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SPORTS THAT KILL 



BY 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE, 

author of 

'crumbs swept up," "abominations of modern society," "first series 

of sermons," "second series of sermons," "old wells dug 

out," "around the tea-table," etc., etc. 



PHONOGRAPHICALLY REPORTED AND REVISED. 




NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 

1875. 







Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by 

Harper & Brothers, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



PREFACE 



fT^O save people from the Theatre as it now is, 
-*- from bad books and newspapers, from strong 
drink, from ruinous extravagance, and from an im- 
pure life, as well as to suggest healthful forms of 
amusement, I first pronounced, and now print, these 
discourses. They have already been abundantly 
blessed and cursed by the people. I do not make 
in them the usual apology of haste, for they would 
probably have been no better if they had been care- 
fully written out by myself rather than produced by 
reporter's pencil. I do not invoke the leniency of 
critics, but give them my full permission to stick in 
their quills wherever they may. That God will bless 
this book to the present and eternal safety of those 
who shall read it, is all I ask. The book is a sequel 
to "The Abominations of Modern Society," publish- 
ed three years ago. 

I have not spoken with the tongue of a cynic. 
Life is to me a rapture. I know of no one who 



PREFACE. 



laughs louder or more than I do. But for the sports 
and recreations of life I should have been dead long 
ago. God has done every thing to please and amuse 
us. In poetic figure we sometimes speak of natu- 
ral objects as being in pain, but it is a mere fancy. 
Poets say the clouds weep, but they never yet shed 
a tear; and that the winds sigh, but they never did 
have any trouble ; and that the storm howls, but it 
never lost its temper. The world is a rose, and the 
universe a garland. When there are so many inno- 
cent things to please and recreate, let us keep off 
dangerous territory. 

T. De Witt Talmage. 

Brooklyn Tabernacle, 

January, 1875. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



Samson's Sport 7 

The Bells of the Horses 32 

Fruit Speckled and Sour 51 

Steering between the Rocks 75 

Christian Gymnastics 98 

Theatrical Invasion of the Sabbath 119 

The Wholesale Slaughter 142 

The Crusade of Demons 162 

The American Plague-spot 173 

God- defying Extravagance of Modem Society 197 

The Shears of Delilah 217 



SPORTS THAT KILL. 



SAMSON'S SPORT. 



"And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they 
said, Call for Samson, that he may make ns sport. And they 
called for Samson out of the prison-house; and he made them 
sport." — Judges xvi., 25. 

THERE were three thousand people assem- 
bled in the temple of Dagon. They had 
come to make sport of eyeless Samson. They 
were all ready for the entertainment. They 
began to clap and pound, impatient for the 
amusement to begin, and they cried, "Fetch 
him out ! fetch him out !" Yonder I see the 
blind old giant coming, led by the hand of a 
child into the very midst of the temple. At 
his first appearance there goes up a shout of 
laughter and derision. The blind old giant 
pretends he is tired, and wants to rest himself 
against the pillars of the house ; so he says to 
the lad who leads him, " Show me where the 



SAMSON'S SPORT. 



main pillars are." The lad does so. Then 
the strong man puts his right hand on one 
pillar and his left hand on another pillar, and, 
with the mightiest push that mortal ever 
made, throws himself forward until the whole 
house comes down in thunderous crash, grind- 
ing the audience like grapes in a wine-press. 
"And so it came to pass, when their hearts 
w^ere merry, that they said, Call for Samson, 
that he may make us sport. And they called 
for Samson out of the prison-house; and lie 
made them sport." 

In other words: There are sports that are 
destructive, and bring down disaster and 
death upon the heads of those who practice 
them. While they laugh and cheer, they die. 
The three thousand who perished that day in 
Gaza are as nothing compared with the tens 
of thousands who have been destroyed, body, 
mind, and soul, by the average American the- 
atre. 

The histrionic art arose in Greece. It was 
invented in the attempt to make great oc- 
casions of amusement and idolatry more en- 
tertaining and impressive. Although Sopho- 



ROOFS OF GOLD. 



cles, and Euripides, and other Greek writers 
dramatized in elegant and pure style, yet the 
chief theatrical spectacles of those days were 
scenes of the most disgusting impurities. As 
the nations plunged into excesses, theatres 
flourished, and dramatists were honored. The 
proud days of Grecian strength and courage 
suggested by Salamis and Marathon had gone, 
and the land that had produced a great army 
of orators, dramatists, artists, and architects, 
despised the restraints of Solon and Draco, 
and went into the shadow of death. 

In the days of Roman prosperity, the thea- 
tre was prohibited, and not until the seven 
hundredth year of the great caj3ital did this 
institution get a foothold. But once estab- 
lished, it ran a mighty career of cruelty and 
licentiousness, from the record of which com- 
mon decency veils its face. The theatre of 
Marcus ^Emilius Scaurus would hold eighty 
thousand people. At Nero's command, the 
theatres were covered with gold. Some of 
the buildings were so large that they inclosed 
trees and statues and fountains; and in order 
to cool and refresh the multitudes of people 

1* 



io SAMSON'S SPORT. 

assembled in the play, a mixture of water, 
wine, and Sicilian saffron was prepared, and 
this was led through pipes to the highest 
seats, and from thence it distilled in fine rain 
that purified and cooled the air throughout 
the theatre. 

The drama came on down through the ages, 
supported by the pens and the genius of some 
of the greatest writers and actors that the 
world has ever known. Dramatic exhibitions 
were first made in France, by the pilgrims 
who had come back from the Holy Land. 
Here were recited the scenes through which 
they had passed. Scriptural scenes were af- 
terward enacted in a building in which were 
three scaffoldings, one above another. The 
highest scaffolding was arranged so as to rep- 
resent Heaven, the middle the World, and the 
lowest to depict Hell. Although this was 
called a religious ceremony, the debauchery 
connected therewith caused Parliament to for- 
bid it by a special enactment. But the drama 
arose in other garb, and won the sanction of 
the Government. In 1832 the French Chamber 
of Deputies voted one million three hundred 



HOPE AND CHARITY DRUNK. 



thousand francs for the support of theatres, 
and to - day the most brilliant assemblages 
gathered in Paris are in theatres. 

In England, the first exhibitions of this art 
were planned and conducted by the clergy, and 
were the Miracle Plays, or scenes in the life 
of the apostles, or the burning of the martyrs. 
The blasphemy of the thing arose to such a 
height that God was represented as acting on 
the stage ; and, lest the play should be too se- 
rious, Satan and his imps were introduced to 
excite the mirthfulness of the audience. When 
England could no longer endure these out- 
rages, "The Moralities" were enacted in a series 
of plays in which the virtues were allegorized. 
Faith, Hope, Charity, and Prudence came upon 
the boards. At one of these plays, enacted 
before the king, the actors became intoxicated, 
and Hope, Faith, Charity, and Peace stagger- 
ed across the stage and fell, and were carried 
behind the scenes dead drunk. These plays 
were sanctioned by the king and by many of 
the clergy. A book containing an account of 
the various sports of the people was ordered 
to be read in the churches. 



12 SAMSON'S SPORT. 

But the time in English history has come 
when the drama is to be extended to other 
shores. The manager of Goodman's Fields is 
to be sold out; but having displayed thor- 
ough honesty in all his dealings, his creditors 
allow him enough of a theatrical outfit to start 
again. With a troop of adventurers, he puts 
out for the wilds of America in 1752. The 
quarter-deck of the vessel was used as a stage 
for frequent rehearsals. After a six weeks' 
voyage, they landed at Yorktown, Virginia ; 
and in Williamsburg, then the capital of Vir- 
ginia, they hired an old store, and transformed 
it into the first American theatre. So wild 
was the surrounding region that, standing at 
the back-door of the building, the proprietor 
shot game flying past. Before the best people 
of that ancient town the dramatic entertain- 
ment was spread. One man with his harpsi- 
chord composed the orchestra; and, amidst rapt 
attention, the Merchant of Venice was play- 
ed. From thence to Annapolis and New 
York these adventurers went. The whole 
country heard of their fame, and praised and 
condemned. In 1754, Philadelphia first saw 



QUAKERS DENOUNCE. I3 

the drama. The Quakers petitioned the au- 
thorities against its admission, but Governor 
Hamilton finally gave permission that twenty- 
four plays might be offered, provided nothing 
indecent or immoral should appear, and the 
manager should give security for the debts 
contracted by the company. On the first al- 
ley above Pine Street the first theatre of Phil- 
adelphia was opened to a great audience that 
rushed in, gathered by the novelties of the 
scene and the great excitement that had been 
raised. Since then, many theatres have arisen 
in honor of the drama ; and the foot of every 
great actor in our clay has trod the Philadel- 
phia and New York stage. 

At this hour the drama wields a mighty 
influence in this country; and although it 
comes down to us unexhausted by the march 
of many hundred years, and wearing gar- 
lands that many hands in all ages have en- 
twined, we are not presumptuous when to- 
night we arraign it for trial, and, in the name 
of God, read the indictment, and demand of it, 
Guilty, or not guilty. 

You say that the dramatic writings of the 



14 



SAMSON'S SPORT. 



world contain some of the best poetry, the 
finest sentiment, the most elevated morality, 
and Titanic strength of style, and the piling up 
by the giants of mountain on top of mountain, 
until on them they have scaled the heavens. 
I admit it. You say that the theatre has mar- 
shaled in its service some of the best poetry, 
music, eloquence, and painting. I admit it. 
You say that some of the purest of men have 
catered for the dramatic tastes of the world. 
I admit it. Witness Milton, and Dr. Young, 
and Hannah More, and Addison, and Walter 
Scott. You say that some of the dramatic 
writings of the world have had decidedly a 
religious tendency. I admit it. You say that 
some of the most astonishing talent that the 
world has ever seen has made its chief exhibi- 
tion in the play-house. I admit it. Witness 
Conway, and Hackett, and Siddons, and Mali- 
bran, and Kean, and Foote, and Garrick. You 
say that theatres have done many noble chari- 
ties. I know it. Witness the hospitals that 
have been founded, the destitute families that 
have received their benefits, and the wonder- 
ful charities that flowed from them just after 



NOT ALL BAD. 



15 



the Chicago fire. You say that some j)eople 
have gone frequently to the theatre without 
suffering any depreciation of morals. No 
doubt of it. You say that vast multitudes of 
people have, through the theatre, become ac- 
quainted with literature that otherwise they 
would never have had an opportunity of be- 
coming acquainted with. I admit dt. Wit- 
ness the plays of Shakspeare, that are in the 
mouths of people who can neither read nor 
write. You ask, would not a theatre with 
virtuous actors, and an audience of perfect cor- 
rectness in behavior, and where every thing 
was conducted in a Christian manner, be high- 
ly beneficial to a Christian community? No 
doubt of it. Such an institution would be an 
auxiliary to the Church. You say that you 
know theatres which answer exactly this de- 
scription. Then I exclude such from any 
thing that I shall say to-night, for I come not 
for wholesale denunciation, but to do justice. 
A lie told against a theatre or a gambling- 
house is just as bad as any other lie. You 
say that some theatres are much more de- 
graded than any thing I describe. Probably 



1 6 SAMSON'S SPORT. 

so. But I take all the theatres of this coun- 
try, of whatever character, and strike the aver- 
age. I have but one object in this sermon, 
and from that I shall not swerve. It is the 
discussion of the question, Should a Christian 
man favor the theatre as it now is % I say not. 
First, because of its deleterious effects upon 
the retainers and employes of the stage. There 
have been connected with theatres hi^h-mind- 
ed and pure-hearted men, and I have no doubt 
that from this employment men have gone at 
last to heaven. But that the majority of the 
people employed in our theatres are of a most 
undesirable character will be, in general, ad- 
mitted. How many of you would like to 
have your sons and daughters grow up and 
launch out in the association of play-actors? 
"Would it be an agreeable prospect if you 
thought that your daughter would become 
one of the ballet-dancers who revolve so 
gracefully, and manage their feet in such a 
modest and unobtrusive manner ? If a com- 
pany of play actors and actresses proposed 
spending a month at Long Branch next sum- 
mer, and should invite you to allow your son 



GREENROOM BE HA VI OR. 



17 



of fifteen and your daughter of seventeen years 
to spend that month with them, would you al- 
low them to go? Nay; the disaster of put- 
ting your children five feet under the ground 
in Greenwood would be a hallelujah com- 
pared with it. W. B. Wood, the actor, in a 
book written in defense of the stage, speak- 
ing of his association with people of his pro- 
fession, says : " How different is a theatre 
from our preconceived notions of one. A 
few weeks have shown me the vileness of 
envy and jealousy, and the pangs of disap- 
pointed hope and ambition. No one do I 
see of either sex even moderately contented. 
The greater proportion, particularly the com- 
ic department, are positively miserable." So 
much for the testimony of a man who knows 
all about it. Indeed, how could you expect a 
man who is, night after night, impersonating 
a miser, a highwayman, a libertine, a knave, or 
a murderer, to remain content, or pure, or hon- 
est? The man who so often assumes a bad 
character after a while becomes that which 
he represents. The associations of the green- 
room are blasting. It is a terrific ordeal, 



1 8 SAMSON'S SPORT. 

through which but few can pass unsinged. 
The whole land ever and anon rings with 
some outcry of shame or cruelty that shows 
that many of the theatrical troupe are not 
strangers to the dram-shop and the brothel. 
The most prominent actors in the country 
have not suffered or lost their popularity by 
the discovery of their licentiousness. The 
crimes which wither other men seem to excite 
no astonishment when performed by these so- 
called " educators of public taste." Rousseau, 
who was never charged with any love for Pu- 
ritanic notions or Christian sobriety, writes: 
" I observe in general that the situation of an 
actor is a state of licentiousness and bad mor- 
als ; that the men are abandoned to low prac- 
tices ; that the women lead a scandalous life." 
Why is it, when you speak of a woman's attach- 
ment to the stage, you speak of it in a whis- 
per, saying, " She is an actress V Why do you 
not talk it out like you do every other occu- 
pation and profession ? Show me one person 
connected with the theatre regularly, and for 
a long time, who goes about performing Chris- 
tian offices, and serving God and serving his 



STRANGE PRAYER-MEETING. 



19 



Church ; show me one such person, and I will 
show you a hundred who have been ruined 
for time and for eternity through the influ- 
ence of the American theatre. Once holding 
a preaching service in Chestnut Street Theatre, 
before the service began, at the suggestion of 
Mr. George H. Stuart, we had a prayer-meeting 
in the "greenroom." It was a very strange 
thing to hold there. There are not many 
prayer-meetings in "greenrooms." Why is it 
that in England, and America, and Italy, and 
France, and Spain, and throughout the whole 
civilized world this profession excites suspi- 
cion \ No unfounded prejudice could excite 
such universal disapprobation. Why does 
such a suspicion exist everywhere ? Let par- 
ents, watchful of their children's associations, 
and sisters proud of their brothers, and men, 
intelligent, reputable, and Christian, answer. 

Again, a Christian man should discounte- 
nance the theatre as it is, because of its ad- 
juncts of evil. Find a theatre, and not many 
steps off you find the haunts of drunkenness 
and impurity. In the same building is a 
place where you may take a drink; and all 



SAMSON'S SPORT. 



around the place are solicitations to lust and 
wine. In almost every case, when a theatre is 
constructed, the property near it depreciates. 
The popularity and prosperity of the theatre 
can not be kept up in ordinary cases without 
these adjuncts of evil. Two of the largest thea- 
tres in London resolved to have no bar where 
intoxicating liquors could be jnirchased, and 
the abandoned were to be kept out as much as 
possible. The theatres went clown, so that one 
was turned into a menagerie and the other into 
a iuggler's entertainment. The managers of 
the old Tremont Theatre in Boston took out no 
license for the sale of intoxicating liquors, and 
passed a regulation that every female not ac- 
companied by a gentleman should be prohibit- 
ed entrance. The consequence was that the 
theatre went clown — the manager in his report 
stating that the theatre would not have an 
audience under such regulations, even though 

O 7 O 

the admission were free. Ay, the theatre 
would have died long ago but for the sur- 
rounding evils that keep adding fuel to these 
wasting fires of hell. 

Again, a Christian man can not countenance 



WHO GO THERE. 2I 



the theatre as it now is, because of the char- 
acter of the majority of the people iclio regu- 
larly attend it. There are many persons ev- 
ery night at these entertainments who are of 
spotless virtue. Some of them go because 
they want to see for themselves. Some go 
as critics. Some go as ardent admirers* of 
tragedy. Some have an unbounded apprecia- 
tion of the ludicrous, and they go to see the 
farce. Some, judging from the fact that they 
themselves have been uninjured, take their 
families. The splendid actiug draws forth 
their applause, and they are unabashed by 
the indecencies that shine through the play 
or throw up their heels in the dance. But 
are the great audiences of the theatres made 
up chiefly of this sort? No, no. Husbands 
w r ho have lost all love for home go there. 
Horse -jockeys go there. Thieves go there. 
The lecherous go there. Spendthrifts go 
there. Drunkards go there. Lost women 
go there.- The offscourings of society go there 
by scores and by hundreds. They block up 
the door-way. They hang over the gallery, 
and ogle, and smirk, and shout aloud in the 



22 SAMSON'S SPORT. 

applause that greets a brilliant passage, or one 
that caricatures religion, or sneers at virtue as 
prudery or overniceness, or hints at indecency, 
and makes the pure -hearted wife or mother 
turn away her head and say, " God forgive 
us for ever coming to such a place as this." 
An institution that nightly draws together 
from the lowest haunts of vice so many of the 
leprous, and unwashed, and abandoned, must 
have in it a moral taint. Walking forth in 
the fields, I see in the distance flocks of crows 
and buzzards hovering over a corner of the field. 
I can not see any thing beneath, but I know 
what is there — a carcass, else the crows and the 
buzzards would not be so multitudinous in 
that quarter. So when, in the community, I see 
the unclean and the reprobate in great mul- 
titudes swarming around an institution, I say, 
" There is a carcass there ; there is death 
there." You are a merchant — you want a 
confidential clerk. You go to the theatre to 
get him. Jack Sheppard is being acted. You 
find a young man right before you, in a low 
theatre, entirely absorbed in the play. He 
evidently appreciates and approves. I think 



THE CARNIVAL OF DEATH. 23 

I see you, merchant, leaning over and touch- 
ing him on the shoulder, and saying, " Young 
man, I want a confidential clerk, and you are 
just the man I have been looking for." I do 
not deny that in every audience ever assem- 
bled in a theatre, there may be the good, the 
honorable, the pure, the useful, the humane, 
the conscientious, the true, the amiable. But 
are not the great mass of people that pour in 
and out of oar theatres a different class. Woe 
to the man who sits, night after night, and 
week after week, in the hot, fetid, blasted, in- 
decent companionship of the average Ameri- 
can theatre ! Good influences will retire from 
his soul. Gathering round him, with joined 
hands, will come ruin, debauchery, and wretch- 
edness, to hail him into their brotherhood; 
and at last, having rent out his heart at a 
stroke, they will pour his blood into the cups 
of their carnival, shouting, " Drink ! Here is 
to woe ! and darkness ! and death ! and fire !" 
Dumas, the famous French novelist, who has 
written many plays for the theatre, says, in 
answer to one of his critics : " You would not 
take your daughter to see my play % You are 



2 4 



SAMSON'S SPORT. 



right. But let Die say, once for all, that you 
must not take your daughter to the theatre. 
It is not merely the work that is immoral — it 
is the play. Whenever we paint man, there 
must be a grossness that can not be placed 
before the eyes, and wherever the theatre is 
elevated and loyal, it can live only by using 
all the colors of truth. The theatre being the 
picture or the satire of social manners, it must 
ever be immoral, the passions and social man- 
ners being themselves immoral." Surely that 
man ought to know whether it is safe to take 
your families to the theatre ! It is often said 
Abraham Lincoln died in the theatre, and the 
advocates of that institution think they have 
put a quietus on us when they have said that. 
But why do you not tell the whole story? 
He was shot by a play-actor. So if the thea- 
tre was graced by the presence of Abraham 
Lincoln, it was disgraced by the foulest mur- 
derer of the century. 

Again, a Christian will discountenance the 
theatre, because it has been the aclcnoivl edged 
avenue to destruction for great multitudes. 
How often has a condemned man on the 



STUPID BOARDING-HOUSES. 



25 



scaffold, in his dying speech, said : " The the- 
atre ruined me /" The Bishop of Carlisle ex- 
amined the records of a penitentiary, and 
found that the majority of the inmates were 
first seduced from rectitude by theatres and 
races. Alms-houses, insane asylums, and state- 
prisons have gathered the corrupt fruit of this 
corrupt tree. A young man comes from the 
country. He has heard a great deal about the 
theatre. He goes to what is called a first- 
class theatre for one night. The play is The 
Merchant of Venice. It does not startle him 
at all. But the next night, on the way home 
from the store, he sees a placard on the wall, 
announcing a different style of play, of most 
attractive cast, and the announcement that it 
is positively the last night. (When theatres 
are going to have a play for seven or ten 
nights in succession, they always put on the 
bills: "This is the last night.") The young 
man goes to his boarding-house. Every thing 
is dull. Something says, " You had better not 
go to the theatre ; your father and your moth- 
er would not like it." But he must get into 
the open air. He starts along the street — his 

2 



26 SAMSON'S SPORT. 

conscience bids him halt; but he goes up to 
the ticket-office of the theatre, pays the admis- 
sion, and enters. At first he sits far back, 
with his hat on and his coat-collar up, fearful 
that somebody there may know him. Several 
nights pass on. He takes off his hat earlier, 
and puts his coat-collar down. The blush that 
first came into his cheek when any thing in- 
decent was enacted on the stage comes no 
more to his cheek. Farewell, young man ! 
You have probably started on the long road 
which ends in consummate destruction. The 
stars of hope will go out one by one, until you 
will be left in utter darkness. Hear you not 
the rush of the maelstrom, in whose outer cir- 
cle your boat now dances, making merry with 
the whirling waters? But you are being 
drawn in, and the gentle motion will become 
terrific agitation. You cry for help. In vain ! 
You pull at the oar to put back, but the strug- 
gle will not avail ! You will be tossed, and 
dashed, and shipwrecked, and swallowed in 
the whirlpool that has already crushed in its 
wrath ten thousand hulks. 

But I must leave until next Sabbath sev- 



AN EMPTY THEATRE. 27 

eral important arguments against the average 
American theatre. Some of you will take no 
warning from what I say ; but there are many 
here who will listen. The last time I spoke 
on this subject I said, " If there is a young man 
here who has in his pocket tickets to the the- 
atre, he had better, before he goes out of the 
building, tear them up, lest they prove to him 
a ticket to perdition." At the close of the 
service a young man took from his pocket 
two theatrical tickets and tore them to pieces, 
and the sexton afterward picked them up, and 
told me of the circumstance. So may Grod 
send the truth home — not to one heart, but to 
a thousand hearts. 

I stood one morning in an empty theatre in 
New York. I went in to satisfy my curiosity, 
and to look behind the scenes. Having ex- 
amined the trap -doors and the side rooms, I 
came and stood alone upon the stage. While 
standing there, there came rolling up out of 
the silence into my fancy the scene which, the 
night before, might have been enacted. Pit, 
and boxes, and galleries seemed filled with a 
motley crowd. The stamp of a thousand feet 



28 SAMSON'S SPORT. 

announced the impatience of the audience. 
Suddenly the chandelier begins to blaze, and 
jets of fire leap along the ceiling, and the foot- 
lights kindle their splendor amidst the gor- 
geous scenery. A faint thrum of instruments 
arouses the orchestra, and lips to the brazen 
trumpet, bow to the viol, and fingers to the 
harp, and, with one magnificent burst of har- 
mony, the audience are carried captive within 
the golden gates of sound. The play moves 
on. Princes stalk forth, and courtesans, not 
overmuch attired, come forth from palaces, 
and windows are hoisted from which gay la- 
dies elope, and the heavy scenes are inter- 
spersed with the marvelous evolutions of the 
dancers, and pure sentiment and splendid ora- 
tion are mingled with indecent allusion. In 
that seat is an artist, who has come to see 
the rendering of some famous passage, and 
through his eyeglass he watches every change 
of countenance in the actors. In this box are 
a father and mother, with their sons and 
daughters — the parents watching the play, 
the sons looking out on the galleries ! Hap- 
py family! They have come to cultivate 



A DEPRAVING CROWD. 



29 



their taste, and to become better acquainted 
with human nature. Back yonder is a young 
man all caught up in the greatest enthusiasm. 
He laughs and cries, and chides himself that 
he has not before been to the theatre. He 
will not soon be absent again. He has start- 
ed on the downward course, and what if he 
does go to ruin? It will be to the sound of 
the viol, and the step of the dance, and the 
enchantment of the drama. In that top gal- 
lery see them — the hard-visaged, the ill- be- 
haved, the boisterous, the indecent. That 
poor soul was born in a mountain cottage. 
She helped her father watch the sheep on the 
hill. She used to bring up the cattle at 
night-fall, and well her foot knew the path to 
the spring in the rock. She wandered away. 
God pity that lost soul. No friend, no home, 
no hope. Fain would she breathe again, with 
light heart, the mountain air, and help her fa- 
ther tend the sheep, and go down and take a 
drink at the spring in the rock. 

But the scene changes. Standing on that 
stage, the foot-lights seem to lower, and a mist 
arises before my eyes, until I can hardly hear 



3 o SAMSON'S SPORT. 

or see the assembled audience. The theatre 
seems widening, and, at the same time, grow- 
ing more dim. The pillars, from their dingy 
color, turn white, and the galleries look like a 
floating cloud, and the spectators that I saw 
grow into vaster multitudes — yea, ten thou- 
sand times ten thousand — and the air is stir- 
red with many wings. The ceiling rises high- 
er and higher, and changes as into a canopy 
of cloud, intershot with arrows of fire, and 
there is before me an amphitheatre, of height 
and depth, and length and breadth, and splen- 
dor and power such as I can not describe; 
and instead of the faces that were filled with 
mirth, and lightness, and gayety, I see an ar- 
ray of countenances filled with such earnest- 
ness as men exhibit who are on trial for their 
lives. In the midst of this great audience, 
which are like the leaves and stars for num- 
bers, there begins to arise something that at 
first looks like a great cloud, then like a huge 
pillar; and afterward it grows brighter and 
flames out in glory; and, running my eye up 
and down the tremendous elevation, I find it 
is a throne — a stupendous throne — a great 



THE WINDING UP. 



31 



white throne. And there is an awful hush, 
and I see that the faces around are changing 
into deeper earnestness. Some kindle with 
highest rapture, and some grow pale with 
fear ; and something says : " These are the 
generations of men assembled to give an ac- 
count of all their deeds; and these are the 
parents w T ho were faithful to their children; 
and these are they who corrupted their fami- 
lies; and these are they who plunged into 
earthly crimes and called them sports; and 
these are they who committed soul- suicide; 
and these are they who served their God, and 
found their greatest pleasure in loving him; 
and this — and this is the throne — the great 
tohite throne — the throne of judgment." 

"And I saw the dead, small and great, 
standing before God, and the books were 
opened." 



32 THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 



THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 

'•'In that day sliall there be upon the hells of the horses, Holi- 
ness unto the Lord." — Zech. xiv., 20. 

THE camels of Midia Lad bells which jin- 
gled as they went. The horses of kings 
and conquerors wore on their harness golden 
chains which made tinnabulation. My text 
prophesies the time when the music and the 
merry-making of the world shall be consecrated. 
In the good days that are to come, there shall 
be no less mirth and good cheer, but all shall 
be innocent. Now the clang of the bells often 
means dissipation and riot; but my text pic- 
tures the day when not only all inside the 
temple, but all outside of it, shall be under re- 
ligious influence. " In that day shall there be 
upon the bells of the horses, Holiness unto the 
Lord." That this day has not yet come is evi- 
dent from the present character of that popular 
amusement, the average American theatre, of 
which last Sabbath I spoke, and again speak. 



THE DRAMA DEFENDED. 



33 



I am asked about the influence of the thea- 
tre. The usual mode of discoursing upon this 
subject is to represent all play-actors as de- 
bauched, and the entire audience gathered in 
a theatre as abandoned and reprobate. Now 
what good can a man expect by such a posi- 
tive misrepresentation? Nine -tenths of this 
audience have at some time in their life been 
in a theatre. You do not think yourselves 
abandoned and depraved. Do you not sup- 
pose that every night in some of our theatres 
there are men who go there for the same rea- 
son that took you ? At this point, I wish to 
disclaim any sympathy with those who charge 
upon dramatic literature the crimes of the the- 
atre. Any dialogue is a drama. Solomon's 
Song is a drama. The book of Job is a 
drama. Some of the parables of Christ are 
dramas. The piece in the old New England 
spelling-book, which represents a youth, Christ, 
and Satan in conversation, is a drama. You 
have no right to put upon the works of 
Shakspeare, Addison, and Walter Scott the 
fooleries and outrages of the clog-dancers of 
the theatre. Blot out from sacred and pro- 

2* 



34 THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 

fane literature the drama, and you have de- 
stroyed whole constellations of beauty and pu- 
rity. I love the drama, while I deplore many 
of the scenes into which it has been dragged. 
The drama is like the man who went down 
from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among 
thieves : it has been stripped and left half dead. 
In my last discourse, I gave you five or six 
reasons why a Christian man ought not to fa- 
vor the theatre. I said then that I did not 
speak of the best theatres or the worst thea- 
tres, but, placing them all beside each other, 
I struck the average. I add to-day that my 
objections to the theatre are confirmed by the 
united evidence of the good and wise in all ages. 
Greece and Rome, in the days of their strength, 
forbade it. The vast majority of the Christian 
people of Europe, and America, and of the 
whole world, have condemned it. The Amer- 
ican Congress, in the time of the Revolution, 
condemned it. Josiah Quincy, in 1775, says, 
" The stage is the nursery of vice, and dissem- 
inates the seeds far and wide, with an amaz- 
ing and baneful effect." Washington and 
Franklin, among statesmen ; Socrates, Plato, 



THE PRISONER ARRAIGNED. 35 

and Seneca, among philosophers, have de- 
plored its influence. Almost the entire tes- 
timony of the philosophic and religious world 
have been arrayed against it. But you say, 
" What do I care for Socrates and Plato V 
Then I ask what is the evidence of your own 
Christian father and mother upon the subject ? 
They could have had no motive in advising 
you against this institution, if it were not a 
good motive. You say that the theatre never 
had a chance to vindicate itself — so many peo- 
ple have been against it. Panswer that it has 
had every possible opportunity to vindicate 
itself. It has had thrown around it all the 
fascinations of genius, all the arts of poetry, 
and painting, and eloquence. Not wiiih stand- 
ing all this opportunity of gaining the affec- 
tions of the good, it stands up to-day for trial ; 
and the noblest piety, and the purest philan- 
thropy, and the best morality of the land 
sworn as jurors in the case, rise to render 
their verdict. Prisoner, look upon the jury. 
Jury, look upon the prisoner. Is it guilty or 
not guilty % u Guilty !" is the response, and so 
they say all. 



3 6 THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 

Again, I discountenance the theatre because 
it is the polluter of public taste. The advocates 
of this amusement often recommend it as an 
educator of public taste. But look at the 
character of the plays. Is Hamlet, Macbeth, 
or King Lear a type of that which most fre- 
quently appears? No; stop on your way 
home to -day, and look at the placards upon 
the walls, and you will find a very different 
programme. If Richard III. were being en- 
acted in one theatre, and the Black Crook in 
another, which would have the -largest audi- 
ence? While there are tragedies of unexcep- 
tionable caste, rendered with overwhelming 
power, a reference to the advertisements for 
nine-tenths of the theatres of this country will 
prove the depravity of the public taste upon 
this subject. You have not ink in your ink- 
stand black enough to write down the names 
of scores of plays that are enacted night after 
night in the presence of approving gentlemen 
and ladies. By what law is an indecent thing 
any the less indecent by being on the stage ? 
That which is improper before one person in 
the parlor, in a theatrical audience of fifteen 



LACK OF CLOTHES. 37 

hundred people is fifteen hundred times more 
improper. How would you like to have at a 
party in your house a score of men and wom- 
en appareled as you have seen them, in the 
last three years, trooping forth on the Ameri- 
can stage ? Great scantiness of fig-leaves. One 
student of the play in modern days gives as a 
statistic that he counted seventy thousand im- 
moralities. I do not doubt the statistician ; 
but I think he was engaged in a sorry busi- 
ness. I should as soon think of going out 
upon the commons and devoting myself to 
taking census of the number of dead cats and 
dogs. Who can compute the number of the 
herd of vulgarisms, profanities, and indecen- 
cies that have, with filthy hoof, trampled 
across the stage ? Educator of good taste ! 
If there were nothing upon the boards of 
our theatres but good morals, and pure sen- 
timent, and honest behavior, the upright 
might go there ; but do you suppose that 
there would be such crowds of the reprobate 
in attendance on the average American thea- 
tre, or that there would come down such 
thunders of applause from the gallery? The 



3 8 THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 

elegant sentiment, the exquisite imagery raises 
up a few delicate hands, yet the applause is 
quite feeble. But the innuendo, the word 
that looks two ways, the emphasis that has 
in it a quaver of unchastity — how all the feet 
come down, and the hands clap, the sounds 
dying away only to come up with more bois- 
terous and overwhelming outbreak. The pure 
men who go to such plays are disgusted. But 
they are in a small minority. If you should 
gather together in one audience all the thea- 
tre-goers in this country and in Europe, and 
put to vote in that great audience whether all 
the impure allusions of the play should be 
dropped out, a few hundred people would say 
"Ay!" But by hundreds of thousands of 
majority the audience will cry out, "No! 
no /" Educator of popular taste ! Many of 
the refined, and elevated, and moral people 
have got along without its help. I think 
that there are enough innocent and enno- 
bling amusements in this, as in all other cities, 
to culture good taste in the people, without 
the necessity of a resort to these very suspi- 
cious schools of refinement. Where the the- 



CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 



39 



atre has cultured one taste up to a higher 
standard, it has sunk a hundred lower. Ed- 
ucator of taste ! A mighty missionary work 
is yet before it, for it must begin with the 
" greenroom," and work up through parquet 
and boxes to the top gallery; and this last 
will keep it busy in evangelical labors until 
the dawn of the millennium. Oh, benign and 
gracious institution ! Show me one father or 
mother, brother or sister, son or daughter, that 
it has made a better man or a better woman. 
A few years ago the most popular play on the 
stage of New York was The Drunkard. It 
was said to be highly moral and reformatory 
in its influence. But what a commentary on 
the whole affair, that one of the chief actors 
of that play died in delirium tremens. The 
friends of the theatre make great boast of the 
actress, Charlotte Cushman, a woman pure and 
good, no doubt. I am told that when in her 
prime she appeared in the character of Meg 
Merrilies, her acting had no parallel. But I 
tell you the best thing Charlotte Cushman 
ever did on the American stage. It was last 
night, when, according to announcement, she 



4° 



THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 



forever walked off of it. Exit: Charlotte 
Cushman ! 

/Again, the Christian man will discounte- 
nance, the theatre, because it gives a distorted 
view of life. People defend it by saying that it 
gives one a knowledge of human nature. Put 
a young man in a dry-goods store, or in a law- 
yer's office, and he will learn more of human 
nature in six months than in a lifetime of 
theatre -going. Besides that, it is chiefly the 
worst side of human nature that the average 
play-house sets forth. Heroic Portia, and hon- 
est Gonzalo, and gentle Miranda are not types 
of the characters presented in most of the 
modern plays. What advantage is it for any 
one to sit down in an audience and look upon 
the impersonation of knavery, of libertinism, 
of unrelenting revenge, that looks out from 
behind the curtain upon sleeping innocence, 
and the knife that the murderer lifts, all drip- 
ping with the blood of the victim? If you 
want to see knavery, go look at it in prison 
chains. If you want to see uncleanness, go to 
the hospital, and look at the pile of agony and 
putrefaction. Do you want to see revenge ? 



SIJV UNMASKED. 



41 



Before you get through with life, some one 
will take after you, abusing you, slandering 
you, persecuting you, even unto death, and you 
will find out fully what revenge is. If men 
want to study these things, let them not go 
where they are surrounded by fascination of 
scenery, and palatial residence, and the crime 
is half excused by the skillful dramatist ; but 
let them take a police officer and go clown 
through the dens of the metropolis, and see at 
midnight vice, and loathsome bestiality and 
festering; abomination, and breathe the sicken- 
ing stench that comes up from the cellar where 
humanity wriggles in filth, and rots alive, and 
rends out its heart in torture, and blasphemes 
God, and dies. By the time you get through 
life, you will know more about human nature 
than you want to. There are multitudes of 
people who understand the world, its passions, 
its ambitions, its trickeries, its sources of 
power, its misfortunes, and who can touch the 
key of any emotion, and at will play the high 
notes of gladness, or the deep tones of woe, 
without ever having gone to this questionable 
school. But remember that hundreds of men 



42 



THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 



are ruined by city exploration. They go to 
see for themselves. A man hears that lions 
are very dangerous. He says, "Is that so?" 
He opens the cage ; and the monster with one 
stroke fells him, and with one craunch grinds 
up his skull. The lion never imagined that 
the man had come in to study natural history. 
Oh ! the devil is mean. He says, " Come in 
and see." The man goes in to look for him- 
self; the roaring lion grabs him, and he is 
gone. He learns human nature dearly who 
learns it at the risk of his immortal nature. 

Again, I charge upon the average American 
theatre much of the unliealth of this country. 
The man who sits night after night, until ten 
or eleven o'clock, in the theatre, and then takes 
his oysters and his ale, and crawls into his bed 
at twelve or one o'clock, will be a sick man. 
No physical constitution can endure it. The 
nerves shattered, the imagination excited, the 
strength exhausted, he will be eaten up by 
disease, and pitch into an early grave. The 
American theatre has filled the land with an 
army of invalids. We see them dying with 
dyspepsia, with neuralgia, with liver com- 



MIXED ATMOSPHERE. 



43 



plaints, and consumptions, and there is con- 
gratulation in hell that the theatre killed 
them. It is death to a man to be busy all day 
in a store, the air poisoned and corrupt, and 
then, as a usual thing, to spend three hours at 
night in a theatre, the atmosphere of which is 
made up of ten parts of cologne, fifty parts of 
tobacco, one part of oxygen, and three hundred 
and seventy parts of poor whisky. Oh ! I 
have seen the average American theatre throw 
upon society a great many weak, inane, and 
corrupt men unfit either for living or dying. 
I knew a man in this city who was once fore- 
most in the church, who came under the fasci- 
nations of the American theatre. He gave up 
the Sabbath. He gave up the Bible. He 
gave up God. He came to deny even his own 
existence, adopting the absurd theory that 
every thing is imaginary. He went many 
nights in succession to see Macbeth in the 
old Broadway Theatre. It blasted him body 
and soul. 

Again, I charge upon the average theatre 
the fact that it is the enemy of domestic life. 
There are many places in this country where 



44 



THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 



there are father and mother and children, 
but no home. The children are handed over 
to irresponsible employes, while father and 
mother are out at the theatre. Wherever it 
offers its fascinations children are a great nui- 
sance. If the measles come to the little ones 
the week that Davenport plays, Davenport 
triumphs, and the measles go under. This 
institution has run its red-hot plowshare 
through hundreds of domestic circles. The 
average theatre is the sworn, bitter, everlast- 
ing foe of the home -circle. What will that 
mother say when she goes up to Gocl, and God 
asks : " Where are your children V She will 
say : " One of them turned out to be a de- 
frauder, and another went off from home, and 
was never heard from again. I did all I could 
for them ; that is, I gave three dollars a week 
to a good Irish nurse, and it was her business 
to take care of them." 

And now I have some remarks of a more 
general nature. You must have noticed last 
Sabbath night, and this, that I have no sym- 
pathy with ecclesiastical strait-jackets, or with 
that wholesale denunciation of amusements to 



OPPOSED TO EVERY THING. 45 

which many churches are pledged. A book 
just issued says that a Christian man has a 
right to some amusements ; for instance, if he 
comes home at night weary from his work, 
and, feeling the need of recreation, puts on his 
slippers, and goes into his garret, and walks 
lively around the floor several times, there can 
be no harm in it. I believe the Church of 
God has made a tremendous mistake in try- 
ing to suppress the sportfulness of youth, and 
drive out from men their love of amusement. 
If God ever implanted any thing in us, He 
implanted this desire. But instead of provid- 
ing for this demand of our nature, the Church 
of God has, for the main part, ignored it. As, 
in a riot, the mayor plants a battery at the end 
of the street, and has it fired off, so that every 
thing is cut down that happens to stand in 
the range, the good as well as the bad, so 
there are men in the Church who plant their 
batteries of condemnation, and fire away in 
discriminately. Every thing is condemned 
There are a great many who denounce ball 
playing. They hate puzzles. They despise 
charades. They abhor tableaux. They say 



4 6 THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 

"Away with all parlor games !" They talk as 
if they would like to have our youth dressed 
in blue uniform, like the children of an orphan 
asylum, and march down the path of life to 
the tune of the Dead March in Saul. They 
hate a blue sash or a rose-bud in the hair, or 
tasseled gaiter, and think a man almost ready 
for Sing Sing who utters a conundrum. 
What do they prescribe for our young people 
in the way of recreation? Prayer-meetings! 
Now, a young man, busy in the store from 
seven in the morning until six at night, some- 
times wants something besides prayer- meet- 
ings. We have a physical as well as a spirit- 
ual nature, that asks for recreation. Young 
Men's Christian Associations of the country 
are doing a glorious work. They have fine 
reading-rooms, and all the influences are of the 
best kind. I believe the time is coming when 
these associations will also supply physical 
recreations; when, added to their reading- 
rooms and to their prayer-meetings, there will 
be gymnasiums and bowling-alleys, where 
without any evil surroundings, our young men 
may get physical as well as spiritual improve- 



SICKLINESS NOT RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



47 



nient. We are dwindling away to a narrow- 
chested, weak -armed, feeble -voiced race, when 
God calls us to a work in which He wants 
physical as well as spiritual athletes. I would 
to God that the time might soon come when 
in all our colleges and theological seminaries, 
as at Princeton, a gymnasium shall be estab- 
lished. We spend seven years of hard study 
in preparation for the ministry, and come out 
with bronchitis, dyspepsia, and liver com- 
plaint, and then crawl up into the pulpit, and 
the people say, " Don't he look heavenly !" be- 
cause he looks sickly. Let the Church of God 
direct, rather than attempt to suppress, the de- 
sire for amusement. The best men that the 
world ever knew have had their sports. 
William Wilberforce trundled hoop with his 
children. Martin Luther helped dress the 
Christmas-tree. Ministers have pitched quoits. 
Philanthropists have gone a * skating. Prime 
ministers have played ball. 

This church to-day is filled with men and 
women who have in their souls unmeasured 
resources of sportfulness and frolic. Show me 
a man who never lights up with sportfulness, 



THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 



and has no sympathy with the recreations of 
others, and I will show yon a man who is a 
stumbling-block in the way to the kingdom 
of God. Such men are caricatures of religion. 
They lead young people to think that a man 
is good in proportion as he groans and frowns, 
and looks sallow, and that the height of a 
man's Christian stature is in proportion to the 
length of his face. I would trade off five hun- 
dred such men for one bright - faced, radiant 
Christian on whose face are the words, " Re- 
joice ! evermore." Between here and Fulton 
Ferry, every morning, by his cheerful face, he 
preaches fifty sermons. I will go farther, and 
say that I have no confidence in a man who 
makes a religion of his gloomy looks. That 
kind of a man always turns out badly. I 
would not want him for the treasurer of an 
orphan asylum. The orphans would suffer. 
Among forty people whom I received into the 
church at one communion, there was only one 
applicant of whose piety I was suspicious. 
He had the longest story to tell ; had seen the 
most visions, and gave an experience so rap- 
turous and profound that all the other appli- 



VOLCANIC EXPLORATION. 49 

cants were discouraged. I was not surprised, 
in a year after, to learn that he had run off 
with the funds of the bank with which he 
was connected. Who is this black angel that 
you call Religion — wings black, feet black, 
feathers black? Our religion is a bright 
angel — feet bright, eyes bright, wings bright. 
Taking her place in the soul, she pulls a rope 
that reaches to the skies, and sets all the bells 
of heaven a-chiniing. There are some persons 
who, when talking to a minister, always feel 
it politic to look lugubrious. 

Go forth, oh people ! to your lawful amuse- 
ments. God means you to be happy. But 
when there are so many sources of innocent 
pleasure, why tamper with any thing that is 
dangerous and polluting ? Why stop our ears 
to a heaven full of songsters, to listen to the 
hiss of a dragon? Why turn back from the 
mountain-side, all abloom with wild flowers, 
and ad ash with the nimble torrents, and with 
blistered feet attempt to climb the hot sides 
of fire-belching Cotopaxi ? 

The day comes when the men who have ex- 
erted evil influence upon their fellows will be 

3 



5° 



THE BELLS OF THE HORSES. 



brought to judgment. Scene: the Last Day. 
Stage: the Rocking Earth. Enter: Dukes, 
Lords, Kings, Beggars, Clowns. No sword. 
No tinsel. No crown. For foot-lights: the 
kindling flames of a world. For orchestra: 
the trumpets that wake the dead. For gal- 
lery: the clouds filled with angel spectators. 
For applause: the clapping floods of the sea. 
For curtain : the heavens rolled together as a 
scroll. For tragedy : the doom of the Destroy- 
ed. For farce: the effort to serve the world 
and God at the same time. For the last scene 
of the fifth act : the tramp of nations across 
the stage — some to the right, others to the left. 
"These shall go away into everlasting pun- 
ishment, but these into life eternal." 



THE WAY TO JUDGE. j t 



FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

" For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit ; neither 
doth a corrupt tree briug forth good fruit. For every tree is 
known by his own fruit." — Lxike \i., 43 ? 44. 

CHRIST laid down this principle, and it is 
always applicable, and everywhere appli- 
cable. If you want to find whether an insti- 
tution is good or bad, you have only to exam- 
ine the kind of character it produces. I re- 
member in my father's orchard there was a 
large apple-tree that yielded luxuriant fruit ; 
but it had a hollow trunk, so that we boys 
could hide in it. Which was the best position 
from which to examine the fruit of that tree ; 
in the trunk, where we sometimes used to 
hide, or standing on the outside, looking up 
at the fruit ? " Well," you say, " standing on 
the outside looking at it." And so I really 
believe that those inside the American theatre 
to-day are less competent to judge of its im- 
moral tendencies than those who are standing 



52 FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

outside, and watching the products perpetual- 
ly shaken down. 

There laid two frigates off the coast along- 
side each other — the American theatre and 
the American Church. They were quiet for a 
long time. Although they had different flags, 
there had been no indications for some time 
that they "belonged to hostile fleets. Indeed, 
there were small boats crossing over from one 
to the other so often that the people came to 
the conclusion that there had been a treaty 
formed between them, and that after a while 
the two frigates would come up side by side, 
bringing their different crews into the heaven- 
ly harbor. But three weeks ago to-day a shot 
went out of this port-hole, which has turned 
the opposing craft around, and opened a 
broadside of wrath, denunciation, and carica- 
ture which has filled the air with smoke and 
uproar. It seems as if all the cities had 
wheeled into line. Play-actors who never in- 
dited a stanza of poetry in all their life have 
undertaken to invoke the Muses, and there 
have been cards printed and letters written, 
and even the lightnings of heaven have been 



WIDE AGITATIONS. 



53 



invoked for telegraphic assistance. Distin- 
guished tragedians and comedians, after the 
curtain dropped, have come out in front to 
show that after all they are still alive ! 
Chestnut Street and Old Bowery have been 
heard from. My secretary, who receives and 
opens all my letters (by -the -way, perhaps I 
might state now that I never get any disagree- 
able letters, for my secretary has instructions 
by the year always to destroy such, and only 
"save those which are pleasant ; I say that in 
order to economy on the part of those persons 
who like to save their letter-paper and post- 
age-stamps), says, however, that there have 
been during the past two weeks a good many 
letters critical of the position that I have 
taken, some of those letters marvelous for bad 
spelling and a smell of whisky. One of them, 
I have been informed, told me to go to the 
company of the last being in all the universe 
that I ever want to be associated with. A 
distinguished play-actor met me, and with 
violent gesticulation continued to speak about 
the grandeur of the American theatre and its 
elevating tendency, until I was afraid he 



54 



FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 



would tip over into my arms from intoxica- 
tion, and if there is any thing on earth I do 
not want to fall on me, it is a drunken man, 
for he falls so indiscriminately. Notorious 
libertines and adulteresses have felt called 
upon, in the public press, to defend the grand 
and glorious and heavenly nature of the Amer- 
ican theatre, and there has been an excitement 
for a great distance around, all because one 
plain minister, one Sabbath morning, attempt- 
ed to answer the question of some of the 
young converts in his congregation as to 
whether they ought to patronize the Ameri- 
can theatre as it now is. I am very thankful 
that I have been led, by the providence of 
God, to undertake this subject. From the 
amount of pus and corruption that has come 
out, I am sure it was time to thrust in the 
lancet. Sometimes I have shot at the devil, 
and missed him; but I am certain this time 
the shot has taken effect, from his roaring and 
howling. 

I shall proceed this morning to answer 
some of the objections that have been made to 
the position I have assumed on the subject of 



MISREPRESENTA TIONS. 



55 



the undesirableness of the American theatre 
as it now is. 

First Objection. — " You have made a whole- 
sale denunciation of all play-actors and all 
theatre - going people." I have to reply to 
that: The report of my first sermon on this 
subject unintentionally did me injustice. Per- 
haps the pressure in the columns of the papers 
forbade certain portions of it coming into 
print. Those who were not present at the 
delivery of that sermon, and the editors who 
criticised the position I took, will be sur- 
prised to hear for the first time that they 
have assailed me for a wholesale denunciation 
that I never enacted. I have in my hand 
the short-hand report of that sermon, taken by 
Mr. William Walton, than whom we have no 
more accurate or talented stenographer in the 
country. I shall read a paragraph from that 
report, to show you whether I indulged in a 
" wholesale denunciation," and I ask the gen- 
tlemen of the press who may be present to 
take what I read from that report : 

[Mr. Talmage here read some portions of 
his first discourse, entitled " Samson's Sport," 



5 6 FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

showing that he had admitted that good peo- 
ple had sometimes attended the theatre, and 
that there had been good actors and actresses.] 

You say, "Why didn't you make this cor- 
rection sooner IV I could afford to wait. I 
suppose the printing-press will go on for three 
or four years yet ; besides that, I must confess 
to a very great fondness for mirth, a tendency 
I always have to be checking ; and if there is 
any thing that gives me fun, it is to see peo- 
ple elaborately, profoundly, and learnedly an- 
swering something I never said. But while 
I admitted then, as I admit now, that there 
are pure people connected with the theatrical 
profession, and that there are pure people who 
sometimes go within the gates of the Ameri- 
can theatre, I wish to reiterate that the influ- 
ences of that institution are most baleful, and 
that if a man or a woman connected with it 
shall maintain his or her integrity for any 
length of years under these influences, it is 
because of most unusual and extraordinary 
force of moral character. At the close of my 
first sermon, an aged actor said, " Every word 
that that minister has declared this day is 



M ACRE AD Y TESTIFIES. 57 

true; I know it from my own lifetime expe- 
rience." In addition to the evidence of play- 
actors and managers who have testified as to 
the pernicious influences of the theatre upon 
its employes, I have this morning the evidence 
of Macready, a name mighty in theatrical cir- 
cles, a name mighty all the world over. Ma- 
cready, after retiring to Sherborne, England, in 
the evening of his days, wrote these words: 
" None of my children, with my consent, un- 
der any pretense, shall ever enter the theatre, 
nor shall they have any visiting connection 
with play actors or actresses." Macready 
ought to know. 

Second Objection. — "You have no right to 
oppose the theatrical profession because there 
are bad men in it, any more than you have 
to oppose other professions and occupations 
which have bad people in them." 

No doubt of it. Bad ministers. Bad doc- 
tors. Bad lawyers. Bad merchants. Bad 
carpenters. Bad shoe-makers. But are there 
enough bad carpenters to make carpentry dis- 
reputable? Are there enough bad doctors 
to make medicine disreputable? Are there 

3* 



FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 



enough bad merchants to make merchandise 
disreputable? Are there enough bad minis- 
ters to make the ministry disreputable ? Oh, 
no ! When your child dies, you will want a 
minister to come and read the service. But 
while all the other occupations and profes- 
sions in life have not been overthrown by the 
fact that there are bad people in them, you 
know as well as I know there are enough bad 
actors and actresses to make the profession 
disreputable for the last two hundred years, 
and for the next ten thousand. I really be- 
lieve there are in that profession more drunk- 
ards and debauchees than in any other pro- 
fession that the world has ever known. I tell 
you the curse of God is on that " old mother 
of harlots." I prove it by the fact that when 
a woman goes through the temptations of the- 
atrical life and maintains her integrity to the 
end, as did Charlotte Cushman, we gather 
around and build triumphal arches and spread 
a banquet, and celebrate it with poetry and 
song. Integrity under such circumstances was 
not at all to be expected, and the whole world 
throws up its hands in amazement. 



SATAN UNMUSICAL. 



59 



Third Objection. — " Churches often employ 
at concerts and at fairs people connected with 
the theatrical profession, and therefore churches 
ought not in anywise to assault that profession." 

I reply in the words of John Wesley, " The 
devil shall not have all the good music." I re- 
ply in my own words that when we find any 
music, any poetry, any eloquence, any beautiful 
fine art in the possession of death and dark- 
ness, we mean to capture it for God and for 
the truth. The devil has no right to music. 
He never made a sweet sound in all his life. 
He is the loafer of the universe! and any 
thing we can take from him that he has in 
the way of fine art, we propose to capture. 
Nebuchadnezzar came up to Jerusalem, and he 
despoiled the Temple, and he took off the ves- 
sels of gold and silver that had been conse- 
crated to God. He took them down to Baby- 
lon, and they drank out of them, and they 
drank until they were drunk ; but while they 
were drinking there came a handwriting on 
the wall, and their knees knocked together, and 
their cheeks turned pale. Now I have to tell 
you that much of the music, and the eloquence, 



6o FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

and the poetry, and the fine arts of the world 
have been dragged down into the Babylon 
of sin, but we mean to bring it back again to 
Jerusalem, and re -consecrate it to the Lord. 
And the reason that all theatredom has been 
turned upside down for the last two or three 
weeks is because they have seen the handwrit- 
ing on the wall : " Weighed in the balances, 
and found wanting." Yes, my friends, we pro- 
pose to take every thing that will be of any 
service in the Church of God. We want your 
cornets, your flutes, your bass-viols; we will 
take them all, and consecrate them to the 
service of Christ. We will come and take 
your best painters, and have them fresco our 
churches. We will come and take the amphi- 
theatrical form of your buildings, and will 
adopt it as the best style of audience -room. 
After we have done that, we will come, and 
if your stilted and unnatural style of speech 
has left any eloquence in the theatre, we will 
take that, as when Spencer H. Cone stepped 
from the stage into the pulpit, and became an 
apostle in the Baptist Church, a star in the 
hand of the Lord Jesus. 



INVITATION ACCEPTED. 61 

I have been invited, through the public 
prints, to come to the Park Theatre and Old 
Bowery. I have been told I would be treat- 
ed with a great deal of courtesy. I have no 
doubt I would. I now here publicly accept 
the invitation. I mean to come, not to see 
your plays, but to preach the Gospel of the 
Son of God, as it will be preached in every 
theatre on this continent. Under the auspices 
of the Young People's Association of Phila- 
delphia, I proclaimed the Gospel one night in 
Chestnut Street Theatre. "All hail the power 
of Jesus' name" rang from the greenroom to 
the top gallery, and the Lord came down, and 
there were twenty souls that night that found 
the peace of the Gospel. And I give you fair 
warning, we are coming to take possession of 
your palaces. Surrender ! Surrender ! 

We will not stop with taking the music 
and the buildings, for I now make public in- 
vitation to all actors and actresses, and all 
the employes of the theatre down to the 
clog-dancers and the call-boy on the stage, to 
come and give yourselves to God, and sit at 
our holy communion, and journey with us to- 



62 FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

ward the good land which the Lord has pro- 
vided for us. Come and wash in the fountain 
that cleanses our sins away. You can not af- 
ford to despise the Church. You were not 
brought up amidst theatrical associations. 
Some of you were rocked in the cradle of a 
Christian mother, and prayers enough have 
been offered for you to break you down into 
penitence, if you would only think. You had 
a Christian sister who died in the faith of the 
Gospel. You have a good many friends in the 
heavenly land waiting for you. You were 
made for something better than the life you 
are now living. You have received enough 
injustice at the hands of your theatrical em- 
ployers to make you want to break away from 
the thralldom ; and if you could get out from 
your surroundings, you would start this very 
day. I open the door for you. I invite you 
into Christian association. I commend to you 
the sympathy of the Lord Jesus Christ. By 
the memory of your better days, by the graves 
of your Christian kindred, by the mercy of an 
all-compassionate God, I beg you to come off 
that desert, parched and sirocco - struck, into 



MINISTERS' FUIL RIGHTS. 63 

the gardens of God ! I confess it, we want 
your music, we want your buildings, we want 
your fine arts; above all, we want your im- 
mortal souls, for whom Jesus died ! 

Fourth Objection. — "The preacher, by his 
profession, is hindered from going to the the- 
atre ; therefore he can not know what its real 
character is." 

Before I answer that objection, I want to 
say I have a right to go anywhere you have. 
When the Lord calls a man into the ministry, 
he does not put him on the limits. What is 
wrong for me is wrong for you. What is 
right for you is right for me. I confess that I 
have been but three times in my life in a the- 
atre for the purpose of witnessing a play, and 
that in very early manhood ; and yet is there 
no way of understanding an institution with- 
out constantly sitting in its presence, and un- 
der its influence ? I have never seen the in- 
side of a gambling-hell, and yet shall I forbear 
to tell the young men of my congregation of 
the danger of going to such places? I have 
never seen the inside of a house of shame, yet 
shall I forbear to tell the people of my con- 



64 FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

gregation that those are the gates of hell ? I 
have never felt the pang of physical disease 
in my body, not once ; but shall I therefore do 
nothing for the alleviation of those who are 
wrung with physical torture? I will under- 
take to say this morning that I know as much 
about the theatre as any man in this house. 
I have seen young men by the scores go down 
under its influence. I have seen family after 
family broken up by it, the husband sent to 
his cups, the wife thrown broken-hearted into 
the grave, the daughter cast forth into a life 
of infamy. In this very last week I received 
a letter from a gentleman in this city in which 
he says, " Go on with your exposition of the 
American theatre. I know it is true. I had 
an uncle who had one of the finest of families. 
It consisted of a wife and three daughters. 
He got going to the theatre. He has become 
a confirmed inebriate. His wife sits in penury 
in a garret, and his daughters are waifs of the 
street." 

There are people who sit this day before 
me trembling in the agitated memory of the 
fact that the theatre has sent its consuming 



PRESENT OBSCENITIES^ • 65 

fires through their own houses. Oh, it is a 
monster, so rampant, so cruel, so loathsome, so 
God-defying, I wonder the avalanche of the 
Lord's indignation does not slide down on it. 
Know it ? I know it a great deal better than 
I wish I did know it. While there are excep- 
tions, as I have said in former discourses, and 
am willing to admit now, I have to declare 
that, taking it all in all, the average American 
theatre is a sepulchre full of dead men's bones 
and all uncleanness, and wriggling with Tep- 
tiles, and stenchful with putrefaction, and is 
the very vestibule of hell. " Oh," people say, 
" it has reformed. Why are you talking about 
the way it used to be V My brother, I have 
been vigilant in the last two or three weeks, 
and I found out that there have been enacted 
on stages in Brooklyn and New York plays 
than which none more iniquitous, and dances 
than which none more obscene, were ever wit- 
nessed or heard of since the day when the 
manager of Goodman's Fields opened the first 
American theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia. 
Why is it that the Black Crook and the WJiite 
Fawn, and plays of that kind, cease to shock 



66 FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

the community as they used to? I will tell 
you. When those plays were first enacted, 
even the old theatre-goers sat aghast, and there 
was no applause for a while save by profes- 
sionals, who had by managers been stationed 
around in the room to make demonstration. 
But people soon got used to it, and Christian 
men and women went to see the French nudi- 
ties. They had a great rush for a time, and 
then they were no better off than other thea- 
tres. Why ? Because the other theatres got up 
something just as nasty. 

The theatres to-day are in full race. You 
want to know which will come out behind, 
and which will come out ahead? I will tell 
you. Will it be the Olympic, or the Park, or 
Conway's, or Booth's, or Wallack's, or Niblo's ? 
I will tell you which one will come out be- 
hind. It will be the one that sticks the 
closest to what is called the "legitimate 
drama." I will tell you which one will come 
out ahead. It will be the one that panders 
most to the licentious and debauched taste of 
the great mass of the theatre-goers. 

Another Objection. — "The evil is inexora- 



PERSEVERING PREACHING. 67 

Lie. You can't stop it, and you are only run- 
ning your head against a wall when you try 
to rebuke it." 

The same old story. I suppose that when 
Noah was preaching about the flood, after he 
had preached a hundred and nineteen years, 
people said, " You might as well stop. You 
have only got eight converts — that is about 
one to fifteen years. You will never get peo- 
ple to go into that old craft. You will never 
persuade them that there is a deluge coming." 
But Noah went right on, and he preached a 
hundred and twenty years, although he had 
in all that time only eight converts. I must 
say that I admire the spunk of the old man ! 

When Soclom was to be destroyed, two an- 
gels thought it worth their while to come from 
heaven to deliver from that city one man and 
woman ; and shall I not preach on against 
this iniquity, and declare that there is a del- 
uge of sinful amusement flooding the land, 
even though only eight people are saved ? 
Shall I not go on, though I get out of the 
Sodom of theatrical life only one — only one? 
Besides that, I have received many letters 



68 FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 

from people who say, " We have been going 
there ; we will never go there again." I have 
received letters from Christian fathers and 
mothers that have said, " We have set up a 
new rule in our house." And I believe that 
the discussion now started and taken up in 
different parts of the land will go on until it 
will save ten thousand young men from a life 
of dissipation on earth, and from a destroyed 
eternity. I believe Christian parents who 
have been lax on this subject will have other 
rules for their households; that in the last 
great day it will be found that God's truth 
was never wasted, and that though the peo- 
ple may still continue to rush to the theatres, 
their going will not be a contradiction of my 
theory, but only illustrations of the truth 
that, while wise men foresee the evil and 
hide themselves, the fools pass on and are 
punished. 

Another Objection. — " Your notion is Puri- 
tanic and Methoclistic." I thank you for the 
compliment. Although I am not descended 
in that line, I love the Puritanic Bible and the 
Puritanic Sabbath, and the Puritan's morals 



CHARGE ON THE METHODISTS. 



69 



and the Puritan's God. The Puritan has left 
for this country an inheritance of righteous- 
ness which his maligners have never yet had 
piety enough to appreciate. Who would not 
be a descendant of John Carver or Miles Stan- 
dish % The most consecrated vessel that ever 
came across the Atlantic was the Mayflower ; 
and if our nation had always gone in the track 
of that ship, it would have escaped a great 
many moral and political disasters. " But," 
say some, " you are Methodistical in your ideas. 
That is the notion they used to talk about 
in the old Methodist meeting-houses." Oh, I 
thank you again. There is no grander collec- 
tion of people in all the world than those to 
whom you compare me ; and if my own de- 
nomination, which I love very much, should 
ever tire of me or thrust me out, I should go 
over, "horse, foot, and dragoon," to the Meth- 
odists. " But," say some with a sneer, though 
I can not understand exactly what they mean, 
"you are popular." That is sad enough. I 
never tried to win the favor of the 'public by 
preaching a namby-pamby, sentimental, gush- 
ing Gospel. My religion is not a jelly-fish, but 



7 o 



FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 



a vertebrate. It has backbone, and tells of 
God's justice as well as God's mercy; and I 
have not in anywise, as you know, made a 
compromise of public iniquities. If, notwith- 
standing all that, I have this sin upon me of 
being popular, it is not my fault. I have been 
running with my theology for fifteen years in 
the teeth of the wind, and if people will not 
hate me I can not help it. 

But once more: The objection is made, 
"Your position on the subject is dangerous. 
Don't you know there is a vast amount of 
money involved in this thing V Yes. " Don't 
you know that one actress went off from this 
country some years ago, carrying with her 
sixty thousand dollars, made by fifteen weeks 
of indelicate acting on the stage ?" Yes, I 
know it. You say, "Don't you know that 
many of the printing-presses of the land get a 
great deal of advertising patronage from the 
theatre, and they may oppose you?" I sup- 
pose they may. 

I have been told by my secretary, as well 
as told by some of my friends, that there have 
been in this case threats of personal violence 



THREATS OF DEMOLITION. yj 

unless I would desist. Why, people of Brook- 
lyn, if all the world oppose rae, I shall go 
right on, for I know I am right. This battle 
is God's, not mine. As to those who wrote 
the anonymous letters threatening me with 
personal violence, let the cowards step forth ! 
You have said you would break my head. It 
is all uncovered, and this is a good time to 
break it. Several have threatened the use of 
the assassin's dagger auc ^ °f fire-arms ; and was 
there ever an easier mark than myself stand- 
ing just here, with no pulpit even on the plat- 
form to hide behind? Take aim and fire ! I 
shall go unattended every clay and every night 
to my home by w r ay of Lafayette Avenue, and 
not one of you will dare put the weight of 
your little finger on me. " The Lord of Hosts 
is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge." 

My position on this subject is confirmed by 
the evidence which has been given by nine- 
tenths of the decent printing-presses of this 
country. While they have differed with me 
in a great many respects, and sometimes vio- 
lently differed, I will undertake to say that 
nine-tenths of the newspapers of this cluster 



72 



FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 



of cities have admitted that there are gigan- 
tic wrongs and outrages connected with the 
American theatre as it now is. They say the 
way to do is to reform it. I say it never can 
be reformed. The Lord Almighty, by the 
brightness of his coming, will in his good time 
destroy it. It has had every possible advan- 
tage of vindicating itself. It has had all art 
and poetry and music, and yet it stands up in 
the cities of Brooklyn and New York to-day 
a monster of iniquity. 

The Quarterly Christian Spectator gives 
this recipe for making a drama: "Sixteen 
pounds of powdered brimstone for lightning, 
twenty-four peals of thunder, a dozen bloody 
daggers, a skull and cross-bones, forty battle- 
axes, six terrific combats, three of them double- 
handed, a course of violations, eight murders, 
a pair of ensanguined shirts, one comic song, 
three hundred oaths, and sixty -four pages of 
blasphemy." Oh, it is depraved beyond refor- 
mation. A committee of the English Parlia- 
ment went out to examine it, and came back 
and reported to Parliament that the only way 
to reform the theatre was to burn it down. 



THEATRES CAPTURED. 



73 



Now that is a poor prescription. By the tri- 
umph of God's grace, and great revivals of re- 
ligion, let the theatres be turned into churches, 
their men of genius become preachers of the 
Gospel, their singers belong to the choir, the 
greenroom become the vestry, and the trap- 
door be the place where you shall throw down 
all the unclean manuscript plays of the last 
half century. 

But I must pause at this point. I shall not 
leave this subject incomplete, for I shall go on 
next Sabbath morning, and the following Sab- 
bath morning, and show what is the principle 
to guide us in all amusements. I shall show 
the fearful invasion that they are now attempt- 
ing to make in New York and Brooklyn, by 
introducing secular amusements on God's holy 
day, an outrage which, if the whole Christian 
world does not rouse up against, will over- 
whelm us with iniquity. I must go on until the 
charge shall not be made against me as it has 
been against many of the ministers of the Gos- 
pel, " You tell us what we can't do, but don't 
tell us something we may do." I shall go on 
and show what are lawful Christian amuse- 

4 



74 



FRUIT SPECKLED AND SOUR. 



merits, and what are the principles to guide 
us. 

But our hour for adjourning has already 
come, and the last hour of our life will soon be 
here, and from that hour we will review this 
day's proceedings. It will be a solemn hour. 
If from our death-pillow we have to look back 
and see a life spent in sinful amusement, there 
will be a dart that will strike through our 
soul sharper than the dagger with which Vir- 
ginius slew his child. The memory of the past 
will make us quake like Macbeth. The iniq- 
uities and rioting through which we have pass- 
ed will come upon us, weird and skeleton as 
Meg Merrilies. Death, the old Shylock, will 
demand, and take, the remaining pound of 
flesh and the remaining drop of blood; and 
upon our last opportunity for repentance, and 
our last chance for heaven, the curtain will 
forever drop. 



DRAWING THE LINE. 75 



STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

"They shall teach my people the difference between the 
holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the un- 
clean and the clean." — Ezek. xliv v 23. 

IN pursuance of that authority, I come to- 
day, to draw the line between right and 
wrong amusements. Indeed, it is a line drawn 
by the hand of God, and reaching from eter- 
nity to eternity. On one side of the line it 
is all right, and on the other side of the line 
it is all wrong. I have for three or four Sab- 
baths been arguing against that monster of 
iniquity, the average American theatre as it 
was and is. The nine arguments I have 
brought against it have in nowise been an- 
swered, save by scurrility and vulgarism and 
low abuse, which, instead of overthrowing the 
position I have taken, only strongly illustrate 
the depraving influence of the American the- 
atre upon its retainers and employes. This 
morning I pass on to lay down certain prin- 



j 6 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

ciples by which you may judge iu regard to 
any amusement or recreation, finding out for 
yourself whether it is right, or whether it is 
wrong. 

I remark, in the first place, that you can 
judge of the moral character of any amuse- 
ment by its healthful result, or by its baleful 
reaction. There are people who seem made 
up of hard facts. They are a combination of 
multiplication tables and statistics. If you 
show them an exquisite picture, they will be- 
gin to discuss the pigments involved in the 
coloring. If you show them a beautiful rose, 
they will submit it to a botanical analysis, 
which is only the post-mortem examination of 
a flower. They have no rebound in their na- 
ture. They never do any thing more than 
smile. There are no great tides of feeling 
surging up from the depths of their soul, in 
billow after billow of reverberating laughter. 
They seem as if nature had built them by 
contract, and made a bungling job out of it. 
But blessed be Grod, there are people in the 
world who have bright faces, and whose life 
is a song, an anthem, a paean of victory. 



SANGUINE TEMPERAMENTS. 



77 



Even their troubles are like the vines that 
crawl up the side of a great tower, on the top 
of which the sunlight sits, and the soft airs 
of summer hold perpetual carnival. They are 
the people you like to have come to your 
house; they are people I like to have come 
to my house. If you but touch the hem of 
their garments, you are healed. 

Now it is these exhilarant and sympathetic 
and warm-hearted people that are most tempt- 
ed to pernicious amusements. In proportion 
as a ship is swift, it wants a strong helmsman ; 
in proportion as a horse is gay, it wants a 
stout driver; and these people of exuberant 
nature will do well to look at the reaction 
of all their amusements. If an amusement 
sends you home at night nervous so that you 
can not sleep, and you rise up in the morning, 
not because you are slept out, but because 
your duty drags you from your slumbers, you 
have been where you ought not to have been. 
There are amusements that send a man next 
day to his work bloodshot, yawning, stupid, 
nauseated ; and they are wrong kinds of amuse- 
ment. There are entertainments that give a 



78 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. . 

man disgust with the drudgery of life, with 
tools because they are not swords, with work- 
ing aprons because they are not robes, with 
cattle because they are not infuriated bulls of 
the arena. If any amusement sends you home 
longing for a life of romance and thrilling; ad- 
venture, love that takes poison and 'shoots it- 
self, moonlight adventures and hair-breadth 
escapes, you may depend upon it that you 
are the sacrificed victim of unsanctified pleas- 
ure. Our recreations are intended to build us 
up ; and if they pull us down as to our moral 
or as to our physical strength, you may come 
to the conclusion that they are in the class 
spoken of by my text as obnoxious. 

Still further: Those amusements are wrong 
which lead you into expenditure heyond your 
means. Money spent in recreation is not thrown 
away. It is all folly for us to come from 
a place of amusement feeling that we have 
wasted our money and time. You may by 
it have made an investment worth more than 
the transaction that yielded you a hundred or 
a thousand dollars. But how many proper- 
ties have been riddled by costly amusements? 



A WANDERING SON. jg 

The table has been robbed to pay the club. 
The Champagne has cheated the children's 
wardrobe. The carousing -party has burned 
up the boy's primer. The table-cloth of the 
corner saloon is in debt to the wife's faded 
dress. Excursions that in a day make a tour 
around a whole month's wages; ladies wmose 
lifetime business it is to " go shopping ;" bets 
on horses, and a box at the theatre have their 
counterparts in uneducated children, bankrupt- 
cies that shock the money market and appall 
the Church, and that send drunkenness stag- 
gering across the richly-figured carpet of the 
mansion, and dashing into the mirror, and 
drowning out the carol of music with the 
whooping of bloated sons come home to break 
their old mother's heart. 

I saw a beautiful home, where the bell rang 
violently late at night. The son had been off 
in sinful indulgences. His comrades were 
bringing him home. They carried him to the 
door. They rang the bell at one o'clock in 
the morning. Father and mother came down. 
They were waiting for the wandering son, and 
then the comrades, as soon as the door was 



80 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

opened, threw the prodigal headlong into the 
door-way, crying, " There he is, drunk as a fool. 
Ha, ha !" When men go into amusements 
that they can not afford, they first borrow 
what they can not earn, and then they steal 
what they can not borrow. Fhst they go into 
embarrassment, and then into lying, and then 
into theft ; and when a man gets as far on as 
that, he does not stop short of the penitentiary. 
There is not a prison in the land where there 
are not victims of unsanctified amusements. 

How often I have had parents come to me 
and ask me to go over to New York and beg 
their boy off from crimes that he had commit- 
ted against his employer — the taking of funds 
out of the employer's till, or the disarrange- 
ment of the accounts. Why, he had salary 
enough to pay all lawful expenditure, but not 
enough salary to meet his sinful amusements. 
And again and again I have gone and implor- 
ed for the young man, sometimes, alas ! the 
petition all unavailing. Merchant of New 
York, is there a disarrangement in your ac- 
counts ? Is there a leakage in/ your money- 
drawer? Did not the cash account come out 



THE SLAVE OF PLEASURE. 81 

right last night? I will tell you. There is 
a young man in your store wandering off into 
bad amusements. The salary you give him 
may meet lawful expenditures, but not the 
sinful indulgences in which he has entered, 
and he takes by theft that which you do not 
give him in lawful salary. 

How brightly the path of unrestrained 
amusement opens. The young man says, 
" Now I am off for a good time. Never mind 
economy. I'll get money somehow. What 
splendid acting in this theatre to - night ! 
What a fine road ! What a beautiful day for 
a ride ! Crack the whip, and over the turn- 
pike ! Come, boys, fill high your glasses. 
Drink ! Long life, health, plenty of rides 
just like this !" Hard-working men hear the 
clatter of the hoofs, and look up and say, 
" Why, I wonder where those fellows get their 
money from. We have to toil and drudge. 
They do nothing." To these gay men life is a 
thrill and an excitement. They stare at other 
people, and in turn are stared at. The watch- 
chain jingles. The cup foams. The cheeks 
flush. The eyes flash. The midnight hears 

4* 



82 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

their guffaw. They swagger. They jostle 
decent men off the sidewalk. They take the 
name of God in vain. They parody the hymn 
they learned at their mother's knee; and to 
all pictures of coming disaster they cry out, 
"Who cares!" and to the counsel of some 
Christian friend, " Who are you !" Passing 
along the street some night, you hear a shriek 
in a grog-shop, the rattle of the watchman's 
club, the rush of the police. What is the 
matter now? Oh, this reckless young man 
has been killed in a grog-shop fight. Carry 
him home to his father's house. Parents will 
come down and wash his wounds, and close his 
eyes in death. They forgive him all he ever 
did, though he can not in his silence ask it. 
The prodigal has got home at last. Mother 
will go to her little garden, and get the sweet- 
est flowers, and twist them into a chaplet for 
the silent heart of the wayward boy, and push 
back from the bloated brow the long locks 
that were once her pride. And the air will 
be rent with the father's cry, " Oh, my son, my 
son, my poor son ! Would God I had died 
for thee, oh, my son, my son !" 



STRENGTH FROM TOIL. S3 

I go further, and say those are unchristian 
amusements which become the chief business 
of a maris life. Life is an earnest thing. 
Whether we were born in a palace or a hov- 
el; whether we are affluent, or pinched, we 
have to work. If you do not sweat with toil, 
you will sweat with disease. You have a soul 
that is to be transfigured amidst the pomp of 
a judgment-day; and after the sea has sung its 
last chant, and the mountain shall have come 
down in an avalanche of rock, you will live and 
think and act, high on a throne where seraphs 
sing, or deep in a dungeon where demons howl. 
In a world where there is so much to do for 
yourselves, and so much to do for others, God 
pity that man who has nothing to do. 

Your sports are merely means to an end. 
They are alleviations and helps. The arm of 
toil is the only arm strong enough to bring 
up the bucket out of the deep well of pleas- 
ure. Amusement is only the bower where 
business and philanthropy rest while on their 
way to stirring achievements. Amusements 
are merely the vines that grow about the an- 
vil of toil, and the blossoming of the hammers. 



84 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

Alas for the man who spends his life in labo- 
riously doing nothing, his days in hunting up 
lounging - places and loungers, his nights in 
seeking out some gas - lighted foolery ! The 
man who always has on his sporting-jacket, 
ready to hunt for game in the mountain or 
fish in the brook, with no time to pray, or 
work, or read, is not so well off as the grey- 
hound that runs by his side, or the fly-bait 
with which he whips the stream. 

A man who does not work does not know 
how to play. If God had intended us to do 
nothing but laugh, we would have been all 
mouth ; but he has given us shoulders with 
which to lift, and hands with which to work, 
and brains with which to think. The amuse- 
ments of life are merely the orchestra playing 
while the great tragedy of life plunges through 
its iive acts — infancy, childhood, manhood, old 
age, and death. Then exit the last chance for 
mercy. Enter the overwhelming realities of 
an eternal world ! 

I go further, and say that all those amuse- 
ments are wrong which lead into bad compa- 
ny. If you belong to an organization where 



A WRECK. 85 



you have to associate with the intemperate, 
with the unclean, with the abandoned, however 
well they may be dressed, in the name of God 
quit it. They will despoil your nature. They 
will undermine your moral character. They 
will drop you when you are destroyed. They 
will give not one cent to support your children 
when you are dead. They will weep not one 
tear at your burial. They will chuckle over 
your damnation. 

I had a friend at the West — a rare friend. 
He was one of the first to welcome me to my 
new home. To fine personal appearance, he 
added a generosity, frankness, and ardor of 
nature that made me love him like a brother. 
But I saw evil people gathering around him. 
They came up from the saloons, from the thea- 
tres, from the gambling-hells. They plied him 
with a thousand arts. They seized upon his 
social nature, and he could not stand the 
charm. They drove him on the rocks, like a 
ship full -winged, shivering on the breakers. 
I used to admonish him. I would say, " Now 
I wish you would quit these bad habits, and 
become a Christian." " Oh," he would reply, 



86 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

"I would like to; I would like to; but I 
have gone so far I don't think there is any 
way back." In his moments of repentance, 
he would go home and take his little girl 
of eight years, and embrace her convulsively, 
and cover her with adornments, and strew 
around her pictures and toys, and every thing 
that could make her happy; and then, as 
though hounded by an evil spirit, he would 
go out to the inflaming cup and the house of 
shame, like a fool to the correction of stocks. 

I was summoned to his death-bed. I has- 
tened. I entered the room. I found him, to 
my surprise, lying in full every-day dress on 
the top of the couch. I put out my hand. He 
grasped it excitedly, and said, " Sit down, Mr. 
Talmage, right there." I sat down. He said, 
"Last night I saw my mother, who has been 
dead twenty years, and she sat just where you 
sit now. It was no dream. I was wide 
awake. There was no delusion in the matter. 
I saw her just as plainly as I see you. — " Wife, 
I wish you would take these strings off of me. 
There are strings spun all around my body. 
I wish vou would take them off of me." I 



THE DEATH- SCENE. 87 

saw it was delirium. " Oh," replied his wife, 
" my dear, there is nothing there, there is noth- 
ing there." He went on, and said, " Just where 
you sit, Mr. Talmage, my mother sat. She 
said to me, 'Roswell, I do wish you would 
do better.' I got out of bed, put my arms 
around her, and said, ' Mother, I want to do 
better. I have been trying to do better. 
Won't you help me to do better? You used 
to help me.' No mistake about it, no delusion. 
I saw her — the cap and the apron and the 
spectacles, just as she used to look twenty 
years ago. But I do wish you would take 
these strings away. They annoy me so. I can 
hardly talk. Won't you take them away?" 
I knelt down and prayed, conscious of the fact 
that he did not realize what I was saying. I 
got up. I said, " Good-bye ; I hope you will 
be better soon." He said, "Good-bye, good- 
bye." 

That night his soul went to the God who 
gave it. Arrangements were made for the 
obsequies. Some said, "Don't bring him in 
the church ; he was too dissolute." " Oh," I 
said, " bring him. He was a good friend of 



88 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

mine while he was alive, and I shall stand by 
him now that he is dead. Bring him to the 
church." 

As I sat in the pulpit and saw his body 
coming up through the aisle, I felt as if I 
could weep tears of blood. I told the people 
that day, " This man had his virtues, and a 
good many of them. He had his faults, and a 
good many of them. But if there is any man 
in this audience who is without sin, let him 
cast the first stone at this coffin-lid." On one 
side the pulpit sat that little child, rosy, sweet- 
faced, as beautiful as any little child that sat 
at your table this morning, I warrant you. 
She looked up wistfully, not knowing the full 
sorrows of an orphan child. Oh, her counte- 
nance haunts me to-day, like some sweet face 
looking upon us through a horrid dream. On 
the other side of the pulpit were the men who 
had destroyed him. There they sat, hard- vis- 
aged, some of them pale from exhausting dis- 
ease, some of them flushed until it seemed as 
if the fires of iniquity flamed through the 
cheek and crackled the lips. They were the 
men who had done the work. They were the 



STOLID INDIFFERENCE. 



89 



men who had bound him hand and foot. 
They had kindled the fires, They had pour- 
ed the wormwood and gall into that orphan's 
cup. Did they weep? No. Did they sigh 
repentingly ? No. Did they say, " What a 
pity that such a brave man should be slain ?" 
No, no ; not one bloated hand was lifted to 
wipe a tear from a bloated cheek. They sat 
and looked at the coffin like vultures gazing 
at the carcass of a lamb whose heart they had 
ripped out ! I cried in their ears as plainly 
as I could, " There is a God and a judgment- 
day, and an awful hell for those who destroy 
their fellows." Did they tremble? Oh no, 
no. They went back from the house of God, 
and that night, though their victim laid in 
Oakwood Cemetery, I was told that they blas- 
phemed, and they drank, and they gambled, 
and there was not one less customer in all the 
houses of iniquity. This destroyed man was 
a Samson in physical strength, but Delilah 
sheared him, and the Philistines of evil com- 
panionship .dug his eyes out and threw him 
into the prison of evil habits, and " he made 
sport for them." But in the hour of his 



9° 



STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 



death lie rose up and took hold of the two 
pillared curses of God against drunkenness 
and uncleanness, and threw himself forward, 
until down upon him and his companions 
there came the thunders of an eternal catas- 
trophe. Oh, beware of evil companionship. 
" Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ; and 
let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy 
youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, 
and in the sight of thine eyes: but know 
thou, that for all these things Grod will bring 
thee into judgment." 

I want to offer one more rule. Any amuse- 
ment that gives you a distaste for domestic 
life is bad. How many bright domestic cir- 
cles have been broken up by sinful amuse- 
ments ! The father went off, the mother went 
off, the child went off. There are to-day the 
fragments before me of a great many blasted 
households. Oh, if you have wandered away, 
I would like to charm you back by the sound 
of that one word " home." Do you not know 
that you have but little more time to give to 
domestic welfare? Do you not see, father, 
that your children are soon to go out into the 



TENDER REMINISCENCES. gi 

world, and all the influence for good you are 
to have over them you must have now ? 
Death will break in on your conjugal rela- 
tions, and alas, if you have to stand over the 
grave of one who perished from your neg- 
lect ! 

I saw a wayward husband standing at the 
death-bed of his Christian wife, and I saw her 
point to a ring on her finger, and heard her 
say to her husband, " Do you see that ring?" 
He replied, " Yes, I see it." " Well," said she, 
" do you remember who put it there V " Yes," 
said he, " I put it there ;" and all the past seem- 
ed to rush upon him. By the memory of that 
day when, in the presence of men and angels, 
you promised to be faithful in joy and sor- 
row, and in sickness and in health ; by the 
memory of those pleasant hours when you sat 
together in your new home talking of a bright 
future; by the cradle and the joyful hour 
when one life was spared and another given ; 
by that sick-bed, when the little one lifted up 
the hands and called for help, and you knew 
he must die, and he put one arm around each 
of your necks and brought you very near to- 



9 2 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

gether in that dying kiss ; by the little grave 
in Greenwood that you never think of with- 
out a rush of tears; by the family Bible, 
where, amidst stories of heavenly love, is the 
brief but expressive record of births and 
deaths; by the neglects of the past, and by 
the agonies of the future; by a judgment-day, 
when husbands and wives, parents and chil- 
dren, in immortal groups, will stand to be 
caught up in shining array, or to shrink down 
into darkness ; by all that, I beg you give to 
home your best affections. I look in your 
eyes to-day, and I ask you the question that 
Gehazi asked of the Shunamite : " Is it well 
with thee? Is it well with thy husband? 
Is it well with thy child ?" God grant that 
it may be everlastingly well. 

By these four or five rules I want you to try 
all amusements, and I especially want you to 
try the American theatre — an institution of 
which I have been speaking for two or three 
Sabbaths. It can not stand the test. It is a 
war on home, it is a war on physical health, 
it is a war on man's moral nature. This is 
the broad avenue through which tens of thou- 



CHRISTIANS AT THEATRES. 



93 



sands press into the grog-shop and the brothel. 
Oh, Christian people, stand back from it. Do 
not say, " I go sometimes ;" stand back from it. 
The Kev. Dr. Hatfield, of New York, once 
said to me, " I used to go to the theatre when 
I was a young man. While I was in town, a 
Christian friend from the country came to the 
city. She was visiting at a friend's house. 
I went down to see her, and found that she 
had gone to the theatre. I went to the the- 
atre. I got inside, and I looked, and there I 
saw her fascinated with an objectionable play, 
and I said, * Is it possible, this Christian wom- 
an looking at such things as these !' although 
I was not a Christian man, I said, ' I'll never 
come to the theatre again ;' and that was the 
last time I was ever there. The incongruity 
of a Christian at the theatre drove me back 
from all such indulgences." They tell me that 
sometimes ministers of the Gospel go to such 
places. There may be some here, or there 
may be some to whom these words shall come, 
who thus stultify themselves, and make them- 
selves obnoxious to God. Let me tell you of 
a minister of the Gospel who went to a the- 



94 



STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 



atre in Boston some years ago, and sat in the 
pit, with his hat drawn down over his eyes, 
studying elocution, and a ruffian recognized 
him. He had not his hat drawn enough down, 
and the ruffian called him out by name, " Rev. 
Mr. So-and-So," and called it with a blasphemy, 
and concluded by saying, "Let us pray I" The 
attention of the whole audience was directed 
to him. What was the matter ? Why did 
he sit with his hat drawn down over his eyes ? 
He was ashamed to be there. He had no 
business to be there. A vast incongruity in 
the case of any Christian man, when he sits in 
the theatre. The theatre as it now is, un- 
washed and polluted, is every day becoming 
more polluted ; for I saw in some of the papers 
last night a statement of the fact that, in order 
to meet the pressure of these times, and more 
powerfully attract, the theatres are now pre- 
senting more indecent plays than ever. Oh, 
stand back from it, Christian men and women. 
Before God, this morning, promise your own 
soul, promise the Church of Christ, that you 
will never be seen in such places. 

I can not let you go this morning until I 



THE MAYOR'S DEATH. 



95 



have said it is not all of life to live. We 
were not sent into the world merely for gaye- 
ties and amusements. Are you prepared for 
the great future? Hear you not the tolling 
of old Trinity and the tramp of the Seventh 
Regiment, and see you not the carrying out 
of the chief magistrate of our neighboring 
city? What does it all mean? A warning 
to the stout and the well; for he said, "I can 
endure any thing." This morning the sun- 
light gilds his grave ! Oh, men of the strong 
arm, and of the stout chest, and of the swarthy 
development, " Be ye also ready ; for in such 
an hour as ye think not, the Son of man 
coraeth." 

I was reading, just before I came to church 
this morning, of a woman who had gone all 
the rounds of sinful amusement, and she came 
to die. She said, " I will die to-night at six 
o'clock." " Oh," they said, " I guess not, you 
don't seem to be sick." "I shall die at six 
o'clock, and my soul will be lost. I know it 
will be lost. I have sinned away my day of 
grace." The noon came. They desired to 
seek religious counsel. " Oh no," she said, " it 



9 6 STEERING BETWEEN THE ROCKS. 

is of no use. My day is gone. I have been 
all the rounds of worldly pleasure, and it is 
too late. I shall die to-nisrht at six o'clock, 
and my soul will be lost." The day wore 
away, and it came to four o'clock, and to five 
o'clock, and she cried out at fi.ve o'clock, " De- 
stroyed spirits, ye shall not have me yet ; it 
is not six, it is not six !" The moments went 
by, and the shadows began to gather, and the 
clock struck six; and while it was striking 
her soul went. What hour God will call for 
you I do not know — whether six o'clock to- 
night, or three o'clock this afternoon, or at one 
o'clock, or this moment. Sitting where you 
are, falling forward, or standing where you 
are, dropping down, where will you go to? 
I do not care what you came for; whether 
you came to approve, or came to denounce. 
I have you here now, and I want to tell you 
that Christ died for your immortal soul, and 
that if you will repent, you may be saved. 

There were people who heard me preach 
last Sabbath morning about the theatre who 
were struck in the heart, and who during the 
past week have been inquiring the way to 



IMMEDIATE RECLAMATION. 



97 



God and to Heaven ; and there are thousands 
of people in this audience who are just on the 
line between the right and the wrong, and I 
pray God that this may be the day of their 
disenthrallment. This moment choose Christ, 
and live. 



98 CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 



CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 

" They that use this world, as not abusing it." — 1 Cor. vii., 31. 

MY text implies that there is a lawful use 
of the world as well as an unlawful abuse 
of it, and the difference between the man 
Christian and the man un-Christian is that in 
the former case the man masters the world, 
while in the latter case the world masters 
him. For whom did God make this grand 
and beautiful world? For whom this won- 
derful expenditure of color, this gracefulness 
of line, this mosaic of the ground, this fresco 
of the sky, this glowing fruitage of orchard 
and vineyard, this full orchestra of the tem- 
pest, in which the tree branches flute, and the 
winds trumpet, and the thunders drum, and 
all the splendors of earth and sky come clash- 
ing their cymbals? For whom did God 
spring the arched bridge of colors resting 
upon buttresses of broken storm-cloud ? For 
whom did he gather the upholstery of fire 



THE WORLD OURS. 99 

around the window of the setting sun ? For 
all men ; but more especially for his own dear 
children. 

If you build a large mansion, and spread a 
great feast after it to celebrate the comple- 
tion of the structure, do you allow strangers 
to come in and occupy the place while you 
thrust your own children in the kitchen or 
the barn or the fields? Oh no. You say, "I 
am very glad to see strangers in my mansion, 
but my own sons and daughters shall have 
the first right there." Now God has built 
this grand mansion of a world, and he has 
spread a glorious feast in it; and while those 
who are strangers to his grace may come in, I 
think that God especially intends to give the 
advantage to his own children, those who are 
the sons and the daughters of the Lord Al- 
mighty, those who through grace can look up 
and say, "Abba Father." You can not make 
me believe that God gives more advantages 
to the world than he gives to the Church 
bought by his own blood. If, therefore, peo- 
ple of the world have looked with dolorous 
sympathy upon this host who have this day 



CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 



united with the Church, and have said, 
"Those new converts are going down into 
privation and into hardship. "Why did not 
they tarry a little longer in the world, and 
have some of its enjoyments and amusements 
and recreations?" I say to such men of the 
world, " You are greatly mistaken," and before 
I get through I will show that those people 
who stay out of the kingdom of God have the 
hardships and self-denials, while those who 
come in have the joys and the satisfactions. 

This morning, in the name of the King of 
heaven and earth, I serve a writ of ejectment 
upon all the sinful and polluted who have 
squatted on the domain of earthly pleasure as 
though it belonged to them, while I claim, in 
behalf of the good and the pure and the true, 
the eternal inheritance which God has given 
them. 

Hitherto Christian philanthropists, clerical 
and lay, have busied themselves chiefly in de- 
nouncing sinful amusements ; but I feel we 
have no right to stand before men and women 
in whose hearts there is a desire for recreation, 
amounting to positive necessity, denouncing 



THE DOQR OPENED. 



this and that and the other thing, when we 
do not propose to give them something better. 
God helping me this morning, and with refer- 
ence to my last account, I shall enter upon a 
sphere not usual in sermonizing, but a subject 
which I think ought to be presented at this 
time. I propose now to lay before you some 
of the amusements and recreations which are 
not only innocent, but positively helpful and 
advantageous. 

In the first place, I commend, among in- 
door recreations, music, vocal and instrumental. 
Among the first things created was the bird, 
so that the earth might have music at the 
start. This world, which began with so sweet 
a serenade, is finally to be demolished amidst 
the ringing blast of the archangel's trumpet, 
so that as there was music at the start, there 
shall be music at the close. While this heav- 
enly art has often been dragged into the uses 
of superstition and dissipation, we all know it 
may be the means of -high moral culture. Oh, 
it is a grand thing to have our children brought 
up amidst the sound of cultured voices and 
amidst the melody of musical instruments. 



I02 CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 

There is in this art an indescribable fascina- 
tion for the household. Let all those families 
who have the means to afford it, have flute or 
harp or piano or organ. As soon as the hand 
is large enough to compass the keys, teach it 
how to pick out the melody. Let all our 
young men try this heavenly art upon their 
nature. Those who have gone into it fully 
have found in it illimitable recreation and 
amusement. Dark days, stormy nights, sea- 
sons of sickness, business disasters, will do lit- 
tle toward depressing the soul which can gal- 
lop off over musical keys or soar in jubilant 
lay. It will cure pain. It will rest fatigue. 
It will quell passion. It will revive health. 
It will reclaim dissipation. It will strengthen 
the immortal soul. In the battle of Waterloo, 
Wellington saw that the Highlanders were 
falling; back. He said, " What is the matter 
there?" He was told that the band of music 
had ceased playing, and he called up the pipers 
and ordered them to strike up an inspiriting 
air ; and no sooner did they strike the air than 
the Highlanders were rallied, and helped win 
the day. Oh, ye who have been routed in the 



A 



LUCRATIVE OUTLAY. 103 

conflicts of life, try by the force of music to 
rally your scattered battalions. 

I am glad to know that in our great cities 
there is hardly a night in which there are not 
concerts, where, with the best musical instru- 
ments and the sweetest voices, people may 
find entertainment. Patronize such entertain- 
ments when they are afforded you. Buy sea- 
son tickets, if you can, for the " Philharmonic " 
and the "Handel and Haydn" societies. Feel 
that the dollar and a half or two dollars that 
you spend for the purpose of hearing an artist 
play or sing is a profitable investment. Let 
your Steinway Halls and your Academies of 
Music roar with the acclamation of apprecia- 
tive audiences assembled at the concert or the 
oratorio. 

Still further : I commend, as worthy of their 
support, tlie gymnasium. This institution is 
gaining in favor every year, and I know of 
nothing more free from dissipation, or more 
calculated to recuperate the physical and men- 
tal energies. While there are a good many 
people who have employed this institution, 
there is a vast number who are ignorant of 



io4 



CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 



its excellences. There are men with cramped 
chests and weak sides and despondent spirits 
who through the gymnasium might be roused 
up to exuberance and exhilaration of life. 
There are many Christian people despondent 
from year to year, who might, through such an 
institution, be benefited in their spiritual rela- 
tions. There are Christian men who write hard 
things against their immortal souls, when there 
is nothing the matter with them but an incom- 
petent liver. There are Christian people who 
seem to think that it is a good sign to be poor- 
ly ; and because Kichard Baxter and Robert 
Hall were invalids, they think that by the same 
sickliness they may come to the same grandeur 
of character. I want to tell the Christian peo- 
ple of my congregation that Grod will hold you 
responsible for your invalidism if it is your 
fault, and when through right exercise and 
prudence you might be athletic and well. The 
effect of the body upon the soul you acknowl- 
edge. Put a man of mild disposition upon the 
animal diet of which the Indian partakes, and 
in a little while his blood will change its 
chemical proportions. It will become like 



SOULS WITHOUT BODIES. 



I05 



unto the blood of the lion or the tiger or the 
bear, while his disposition will change, and be- 
come fierce, cruel, and unrelenting. The body 
has a powerful effect upon the soul. 

There are good people whose ideas of heav- 
en are all shut out with clouds of tobacco- 
smoke. There are people who dare to shatter 
the physical vase in which God has put the 
jewel of eternity. There are men with great 
hearts and intellects in bodies worn out by 
their own neglects — magnificent machinery 
capable of propelling a Great Eastern across 
the Atlantic, yet fastened in a rickety North 
River propeller. Martin Luther was so mighty 
for God, first, because he had a noble soul, and 
secondly, because he had a muscular devel- 
opment which would have enabled him to 
thrash any -Rve of his persecutors, if it had 
been Christian so to do. Physical develop- 
ment which merely shows itself in fabulous 
lifting, or in perilous rope- walking, or in pu- 
gilistic encounter, excites only our contempt; 
but we confess to great admiration for the 
man who has a great soul in an athletic body, 
every nerve, muscle, and bone of which is con- 



I0 6 CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 

secrated to right uses. Oh, it seems to me 
outrageous that men, through neglect, should 
allow their physical health to go down be- 
yond repair, spending the rest of their life 
not in some great enterprise for God and the 
world, but in studying what is the best thing 
to take for dyspepsia ! A ship which ought, 
with all sail set and every man at his post, to 
be carrying a rich cargo for eternity, employing 
all its men in stopping up leakages ! When 
you may, through the gymnasium, work off 
your spleen and your querulousness and one- 
half of your physical and mental ailments, do 
not turn your back upon such a grand medi- 
cament. 

Still further : I commend to you a large 
class of parlor games and recreations. There 
is a way of making our homes a hundred-fold 
more attractive than they are now. Those 
parents can not expect to keep their children 
away from outside dissipations unless they 
make the domestic circle brighter than any 
thing they can find outside of it. Do not, 
then, sit in your home surly and unsympa- 
thetic, and with a half-condemnatory look, be- 



LENIENT OLD FOLKS. 



107 



cause of the sportfulness of your children. 
You were young once yourself; let your chil- 
dren be young. Because your eyes are dim 
and your ankles are stiff, do not denounce 
sportfulness in those upon whose eyes there is 
the first lustre, and in whose foot there is the 
bounding joy of robust health. I thank God 
that in our drawing-rooms and in our parlors 
there are innumerable games and sports which 
have not upon them the least taint of iniqui- 
ty. Light up all your homes with innocent 
hilarities. Do not sit down with the rheuma- 
tism, wondering how children can go on so. 
Rather thank God that their hearts are so 
light, and their laughter is so free, and that 
their cheeks are so ruddy, and that their ex- 
pectations are so radiant. The night will 
come soon enough, and the heart-break, and 
the pang, and the desolation — it will come 
soon enough for the clear children. But when 
the storm actually clouds the sky, it will be 
time enough for you to haul out your reef 
tackles. Carry, then, into your homes not 
only the innocent sports and games which are 
the inventions of our own clay, but the games 



108 CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 

which come down with the sportfulness of all 
the past ages — chess and charades and tab- 
leaux and battledore and calisthenics, and all 
those amusements which the young people 
of our homes know so well how to contrive. 
Then there will be the parlor socialities — 
groups of people assembled in your homes, 
with wit and mimicry and joviality, filling the 
room with joy from the door to the mantel, 
and from the carpet to the ceiling. Oh, is 
there any exhilaration like a score of genial 
souls in one room, each one adding a con- 
tribution of his own individual merriment to 
the aggregation of general hilarity ? 

Suppose you want to go abroad in the city, 
then you will find the panorama and the art 
gallery — Schauss's and Snedecor's and Avery's 
exquisite collections of pictures. You will find 
the Metropolitan Museum and the Historical 
Society rooms full of rare curiosities, and scores 
of places which can stand plainly the test of 
the principles I have laid clown in former 
discourses as to what is right and wrong in 
amusements. You will find the lecturing hall, 
which has been honored by the names of 



BREATH OF THE FIELDS. I09 

Agassiz in natural history, Dorenxus in chein* 
istry, Boynton in geology, Dr. Mitchell in as- 
tronomy, John B. Gough in moral reform, and 
scores and hundreds of men who have poured 
their wit and genius and ingenuity through 
that particular channel upon the hearts and 
consciences and imaginations of men, setting 
this country fifty years farther in advance 
than it would have been without the lecture 
platform. 

I rejoice in the popularization of outdoor 
sports. I hail the croquet -ground and the 
fisherman's rod and the sportsman's gun. In 
our cities life is so unhealthy and unnatural 
that when the census -taker represents a city 
as having four hundred thousand inhabitants 
there are only two hundred thousand, since 
it takes at least two men to amount to one 
man, so depleting and unnerving and exhaust- 
ing is this metropolitan life. We want more 
fresh air, more sunlight, more of the abandon 
of field-sports. I cry out for it in behalf of 
the Church of God as well as in behalf of 
secular interests. I wish that this winter 
our ponds and our rivers and our Capitoline 



no CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 

Grounds might be all aquake with the heel 
and the shout of the swift skater. I wish 
that when the warm weather conies the grace- 
ful oar might dip the stream, and the even- 
ing-tide be resonant with boatman's song, the 
bright prow splitting the crystalline billow. 
We shall have the smooth and grassy lawn, 
and we will call out people of all occupations 
and professions, and ask them to join in the 
ball-player's sport. You will come back from 
these outdoor exercises and recreations with 
strength in your arm, and color in your cheek, 
and a flash in your eye, and courage in your 
heart. In this great battle that is opening 
against the kingdom of darkness we want not 
only a consecrated soul, but a strong arm and 
stout lungs and mighty muscle. I bless God 
that there are so many recreations that have 
not on them any taint of iniquity ; recreations 
in which we may engage for the strengthening 
of the body, for the clearing of the intellect, 
for the illumination of the soul. 

There is still another form of recreation 
which I commend to you, and that is the 
'pleasure of doing good. I have seen young 



ONLY TWO CENTS. m 

men, weak and cross and sour and repelling 
in their disposition, who by one heavenly 
touch have wakened up and become blessed 
and buoyant, the ground under their feet and 
the sky over their heads breaking forth into 
music. " Oh," says some young man in the 
house to-day, "I should like that recreation 
above all others, but I have not the means." 
My dear brother, let us take an account of 
stock this morning. You have a large es- 
tate, if you only realized it. Two hands. 
Two feet. You will have, perhaps, during 
the next year at least ten dollars for char- 
itable contribution. You will have twenty- 
five hundred cheerful looks, if you want to 
employ them. You will have Hve thousand 
pleasant words, if you want to speak them. 
Now what an amount that is to start with ! 

You go out to-morrow morning, and you see 
a case of real destitution by the way-side. You 
give him two cents The blind man hears the 
pennies rattle in his hat, and he says, " Thank 
you, sir ; God bless you." You pass down the 
street, trying to look indifferent ; but you feel 
from the very depth of your soul a profound 



CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 



satisfaction that you made that man happy. 
You go on still farther, and find a poor boy 
with a wheelbarrow, trying to get it up on 
the curbstone. He fails in the attempt. You 
say, "Stand back, my lad; let me try." You 
push it up on the curbstone for him, and pass 
on. He wonders who that well-dressed man 
was that helped him. You did a kindness 
to the boy; but you did a great joy to your 
own soul. You will not get over it all the 
week. 

On the street, to-morrow moruing, you will 
see a sick man passing along. "Ah," you say, 
"what can I do to make this man happy? 
He certainly does not want money; he is not 
poor, but he is sick." Give him one of those 
twenty- five hundred cheerful looks that you 
have garnered up for the whole year. Look 
joy and hopefulness into his soul. It will thrill 
him through, and there will be a reaction upon 
your own soul. Going a little farther on, you 
will come to the store of a friend who is em- 
barrassed in business matters. You will go 
in and say, " What a fine store you have ! I 
think business will brighten up, and you will 



COLONEL GARDINER. 



JI 3 



have more custom after a while. I think next 
spring will bring more prosperity to the coun- 
try. Good -morning." You pass out. You 
have helped that young man, and you have 
helped yourself. And that night you go 
home ; you sit by the fire, you talk a little, you 
sing a little, you laugh a little ; you say, " I 
really don't know what is the matter with me. 
I never felt so splendidly in my life." I will 
tell what is the matter with you. You spent 
only two cents out of the ten dollars; you 
have contributed one out of twenty -five hun- 
dred cheerful looks ; you have given ten, fif- 
teen, or twenty of the five thousand pleasant 
words you are going to speak during the year; 
you have with your own hands helped the boy 
with the wheelbarrow, and you feel in body, 
mind, and soul the thrill of that recreation. 
Which do you think was the happier — Colonel 
Gardiner, who sat with his elbow on a table 
spread with all extravagant viands, looking off 
at a dog on the rug, saying, "How I would 
like to change places with him ; I be the dog 
and he be Colonel Gardiner;" or those two 
Moravian missionaries who wanted to go into 



ii4 



CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 



the lazaretto for the sake of attending the sick, 
and they were told, "If you go in there, you 
will never come out. We never allow any one 
to come out, for he would "bring the conta- 
gion." Then they made their wills and went 
in, first to help the sick, and then to die. 
Which was the happier — Colonel Gardiner, or 
the Moravian missionaries dying for others? 
Was it all sacrifice when the missionaries 
wanted to bring the Gospel to the negroes at 
the Barbados, and, being denied the privilege, 
sold themselves into slavery, standing side by 
side, and lying side by side down in the very 
ditch of suffering, in order that they might 
bring those men up to life and God and heav- 
en ? Oh, there is a thrill in the joy of doing 
good ! It is the most magnificent recreation to 
which a man ever puts his hand or his head or 
his heart. 

But, before closing, I want to impress upon 
you that mere secular amusement and enter- 
tainment are not a fit foundation for your soul 
to build on. Have you never had in your own 
life illustrations of the fact that worldly amus.e- 
ments are not sufficient, and that the pleasures 



THE SCHUYLKILL DISASTER. 



"5 



of this life are, after all, evanescent, and the 
morning that opens most brightly may end in 
the darkest night ? I know there are those in 
this audience who seek in the pleasures of this 
world their chief satisfaction ; and I want to 
tell them of the mistake they are making be- 
fore they wake up in everlasting disappoint- 
ment. I had an illustration in my own life of 
how evanescent is earthly pleasure, and how 
that which opens very brightly may end in 
darkness and gloom and trouble. I had read 
in books illustrations of the kind, but I never 
saw any that was as powerful as that which I 
had in my own life. Just after going to Phil- 
adelphia, and while I was yet ignorant of all 
the surroundings of that city, one Monday 
morning, fatigued somewhat with the duties 
of the previous Sabbath, I went out for the 
purpose of recreation, taking, in all, my wife, 
my only daughter, my elder sister Sarah, and 
her daughter, who was a young lady. It was 
a beautiful June morning. Passing along by 
the Schuylkill River, we saw some pleasure- 
boats waiting for excursionists; and one of 
our party said, " Suppose we take a row on 



u6 CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 

the river." I said, " Well !" and in two min- 
utes were all aboard — five of us in all. There 
had been a freshet some days before, and 
the stream was very violent. I laid hold 
the oars and pulled away, and there was 
laughter and shout and joy. Oh, it was a 
very gay party. I was pulling away with all 
my strength, when I heard a shout from the 
shore, and I saw a waving of the hand, as 
much as to say, " Stop ! stop !" I looked 
back, and I saw we were within a few yards 
of the awful plunge over the clam — the dam 
that reaches across the Schuylkill. With a 
cry to God for help, and an agony that I can 
never describe, I laid on to the oars and tried 
to put back. It was too late. We went over 
with an awful plunge, the boat capsizing as 
we went. None of us being able to swim, we 
clung to the rim of the upset boat, save two — 
my wife, who was drawn under the dam in- 
stantly, and my child, who sank. From the 
shore very soon boats came, but it seemed like 
many hours. The survivors of the party got 
into the boat, and we looked around for the 
fairest and the best in all the group, but she 



THE NOON BLOTTED OUT 



117 



was gone. And then I saw under the wave 
the straw- hat of my little child, and I clutch- 
ed for it *as with a death -grip, and I hauled 
her in, black with strangulation. There were 
five of us who first got into the boat, but there 
were only four of us who landed. For six 
days and nights the gunners stood firing the 
cannon across that river, the artillerymen ex- 
pecting, by the disturbance of the air, to raise 
the body from the bottom of the river. They 
succeeded ; but oh ! what a change between 
that bright June morning when we went out 
with laughter and song, and that afternoon 
when we came across the Schuylkill Bridge 
in a close carriage, four of us; my half- dead 
and motherless child, wrapped in flannels, ly- 
ing on my lap. Oh, God ! upon such a bright 
morning, did there ever drop such a horrible 
night ? 

I learned a lesson that day which I teach 
this day to you, and that is, you ought not 
depend too much upon the pleasures and the 
amusements of this life. Oh, people of the 
world, learn this: that while the stream of 
earthly pleasure may break down into dark- 



u8 CHRISTIAN GYMNASTICS. 

ness and into death, the river of God's comfort 
and salvation flows on all through this world, 
emptying at last into the boundless, fathom- 
less ocean of eternal joy. May God bring you 
this day into the soft and beautiful current ! 
Only a few strokes of the oar, and you will be 
landed. 



FATE OF CASTLEREAGH. n 9 



THEATEIOAL INVASION OF THE 
SABBATH. 

"Verily my Sabbaths ye shall keep." — Exod. xxxi., 13. 

THE wisdom of cessation from hard labor 
one day out of the seven is almost uni- 
versally acknowledged. The world has found 
out that it can do less work in seven days than 
in six, and that the fifty- two days of the year 
devoted to rest are an addition rather than 
a subtraction. Experiments have been made 
in all departments. The great Castlereagh 
thought he could work his brain three hun- 
dred and sixty-five days in the year, but after 
a while broke down and committed suicide; 
and Wilberforce said of him : " Poor Castle- 
reagh ! This is the result of the non-observ- 
ance of the Sabbath." A celebrated merchant 
declared : " I should have been a maniac long 
ago but for the Sabbath." The nerves, the 
brain, the muscles, the bones, the entire phys- 
ical, intellectual, and moral nature cry out for 



120 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH. 

the Sabbatic rest. What is true of man is, 
for the most part, true of the brute. Travelers 
have found out that they come to their place 
of destination sooner when they let their 
horses rest by the way on the Sabbath. 
What is the matter with those forlorn crea- 
tures harnessed to some of our city cars ? Why 
do they stumble and stagger and fall? It is 
for the lack of the Sabbatic rest. In other 
days, when the herdsmen drove their sheep 
and cattle from the Far West down to the sea- 
board, it was found out by experiment that 
those herdsmen and drovers who halted over 
the seventh day got down sooner to the sea- 
board than those who passed on without the 
observance of the holy Sabbath. The fisher- 
men off the coast of Newfoundland declare 
that those men during the year catch the most 
fish who stop during the Lord's day. When 
I asked the Eocky Mountain locomotive en- 
gineer why he changed locomotives when it 
seemed to be a straight route, he said : " We 
have to let the locomotive stop and cool off, 
or the machinery would soon break down." 
Men who made large quantities of salt were 



THE NEW ATTEMPT. 



told that if they allowed their kettles to cool 
over Sunday they would submit themselves to 
a great deal of damage. The experiment was 
made, some observing the Sabbath and some 
not observing the Sabbath. Those who al- 
lowed the fires to go down, and the kettles to 
cool once a week, were compelled to spend only 
a small sum for repairs; while in the cases 
where no Sabbath was observed many dollars 
were demanded for repairs. In other words, 
intelligent man and dumb beast and dead ma- 
chinery cry out for the Lord's day. 

While the attempt to kill the Sabbath by 
the stroke of axe and flail and the yard -stick 
has beautifully failed, it is proposed in our 
day to drown the Sabbath by flooding it with 
secular amusements. They would bury it very 
decently under the wreath of the target com- 
pany, and to the music of all Strakosch's bra- 
zen instruments. There are to-clay, in the dif- 
ferent cities, ten thousand hands and ten thou- 
sand pens busy in attempting to cut out the 
heart of our Christian Sabbath, and leave it 
a mere skeleton of what it once was. The ef- 
fort is organized and tremendous; and unless 



122 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 

the friends of Christ and the lovers of good 
order shall rouse up right speedily, their ser- 
mons and their protests will be uttered after 
the castle is taken. There are cities in the 
land where the Sabbath has almost perished; 
and last Sabbath night New York was in full 
blaze of theatric and operatic entertainment ; 
and it is becoming a practical question wheth- 
er we who received a pure Sabbath from the 
hands of our fathers shall have piety and 
pluck enough to give to our children the same 
blessed inheritance. The eternal God helping 
us, we will ! 

I protest against this invasion of the holy 
Sabbath, in the first place, because it is a war 
on Divine enactment. God says, in Isaiah : 
"If thou turn away thy foot from doing thy 
pleasure on my holy day, thou shalt walk 
upon the high places." What did he mean 
by " doing thy pleasure ?" He referred to sec- 
ular and worldly amusements. A man told 
me he was never so much frightened as in the 
midst of an earthquake, when the beasts of 
the field bellowed in fear, and even the barn- 
yard fowls screamed in terror. Well, it was 



GRAND SACRED CONCERTS. ^3 

when the earth was shaking and the sky was 
all full of fire that God made the great an- 
nouncement: "Remember the Sabbath-day to 
keep it holy." Go along through the streets 
where the theatres are open on a Sabbath 
night ; go up on the steps ; enter the boxes 
of those places of entertainment, and tell me 
if that is keeping the Sabbath holy. " Oh ," 
says some one, " God won't be displeased with 
a grand sacred concert." A gentleman who 
was present at a "grand sacred concert" last 
Sabbath night in one of the theatres of our 
great cities, said that during the exercises 
there were comic and sentimental songs, in- 
terspersed with coarse jokes; and there were 
dances, and a farce, and tight -rope walking, 
and a trapeze performance. I suppose it was 
a holy dance and a consecrated tight-rope. I 
am not certain, however, about that ; but this 
I know, it was a " grand sacred concert." 

We hear a great deal of talk about "the 
rights of the people" to have just such amuse- 
ments on Sunday as they want to have. I 
wonder if the Lord has any rights. You rule 
your family, the Governor rules the State, the 



124 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 



President rules the whole land; I wonder if 
the Lord has a right to rule the nations and 
make the enactment, " Remember the Sabbath- 
day to keep it holy," and if there is any ap- 
peal to a higher court from that decision, and 
if the men who are warring against that enact- 
ment are not guilty of high treason against 
the Maker of heaven and earth. They have 
in our cities put God on trial. It has been 
the theatres and the opera-houses of the land 
plaintiffs, versus the Lord Almighty defendant, 
and the suit has been begun, and who shall 
come out ahead, you know. Whether it be 
popular or unpopular, I now announce it as 
my opinion that the people have no rights save 
those which the great Jehovah gives them. He 
has never given the right to man to break his 
holy Sabbath, and as long as his throne stands 
he never will give that right. 

The prophet asks a question which I can 
easily answer, " Will a man rob God V Yes. 
They robbed him last Sunday night at the 
theatres and the opera-houses, and I charge 
upon them the infamous and high-handed lar- 
ceny. I believe with the sailor. The crew 



THE SAILOR'S SABBATH. 12 $ 

had been discharged from the vessel because 
they would not work while they were in port 
on the Lord's day. The captain went out to 
get sailors. He found one man. and he said 
to him, " Will you serve me on the Sabbath V 
" No." " Why not T " Well," replied the old 
sailor, " a man who will rob God Almighty of 
his Sabbath would rob me of my wages if he 
got a chance." Oh, it is dastardly mean when 
we break the Sabbath. Suppose you had 
seven oranges, and you gave to your child six 
of them, putting the other orange in your 
pocket for yourself, and you should find that 
the child had not been satisfied with the six 
oranges, and had come and stolen your sev- 
enth. That is precisely what men do when 
they break the Sabbath. Suppose you were 
poor, and you came to a dry-goods merchant 
and asked for some cloth for garments, and 
he should say, " X'll give you six yards ," and 
while he was off from the counter binding up 
the six yards you should go behind the coun- 
ter and steal one additional yard. That is 
what every man does when he breaks the 
Lord's Sabbath. God gives us six days out 



126 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 

of seven, reserving one for himself, and you 
will not let him have it. It is mean beyond 
all computation. 

Again : I am opposed to this desecration of 
the Sabbath by secular entertainments because 
it is a war on the statutes of our State. The 
law says: 

" It shall not be lawful to exhibit, on the 
first day of the week, commonly called Sun- 
day, to the public, in any building, garden, 
grounds, concert-room, or other room or place 
within the city and county of New York, any 
interlude, tragedy, comedy, opera, ballet, play, 
farce, negro minstrelsy, negro or other dan- 
cing, or any other entertainment of the stage, 
or any part or parts therein, or any equestri- 
an, circus, or dramatic performance,, or any per- 
formance of jugglers, acrobats, or rope -dan- 
cing." 

Was there ever a plainer enactmeut than 
that? Who made the law? You, who at 
the ballot-boxes decided who should go to Al- 
bany and sit in the Legislature. They made 
the law for you and for your families ; and now 
I say that any man who attempts to override 
that law insults you and me and every man 



THE UNJUST JUDGE. 127 

who has the right of suffrage in the State of 
New York. What have been the circum- 
stances? The low manager of a low theatre 
in New York had an entertainment on a Sab- 
bath night. The police came in and arrested 
him. The District Attorney did not, however, 
pursue the case. After a while the prominent 
leader of a prominent opera company adver- 
tises his entertainment. People of all profes- 
sions and occupations protest against it. Judge 
Donohue comes along and issues an injunction 
forbidding the police in any wise to interfere 
with these Sabbath amusements. Judge Don- 
ohue says: 

"I hereby order that the defendants, and each 
of them, their agents and servants, as well as 
the captains, sergeants, and officers of the Police 
Department of the city of New York, refrain 
from interrupting, or in any way interfering 
with any dramatic or operatic performance that 
plaintiff may arrange, give, or conduct at any 
of the theatres in the city of New York dur- 
ing any Sunday, and from arresting the plaint- 
iff, or any other person or employe of the 
plaintiff aiding in such dramatic or operatic 
performance on Sunday for participating in 



i 2 8 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 

sucli performance, and from interfering in any 
way or manner with the plaintiff's business as 
director of the Strakosch Italian Opera Com- 
pany, an orchestral company, and a dramatic 
and operatic company performing on Sun- 
days." 

That injunction hovered over the city for 
three weeks, Judge Donohue meanwhile stand- 
ing in defiance of the voters of New York, and 
of the State Legislature. Some say, as by quib- 
ble, it was necessary for him to entertain the 
motion, and to issue the injunction. Was it 
necessary for him for three weeks to be decid- 
ing this question ? On Wednesday or Thurs- 
day the injunction was lifted. Alas ! that it 
was not lifted sooner. What a pity it was 
that it took three whole weeks, during which 
secular amusements were trampling upon 
God's holy day, to find out that the Legis- 
lature of the State of New York have a right 
to forbid the opening of the theatres on the 
Lord's day ! 

Still further : I protest against this recent 
invasion of the Sabbath, because it is a foreign 
war. Now, if you heard at this moment the 



A FOREIGN WAR. 



129 



booming of a gun iu the harbor, or a shell 
from some foreign frigate should drop into 
our streets, how long would you keep your 
seats in the Tabernacle ? You would want to 
face the foe, and every gun that could be man- 
aged would be brought in use, and every ship 
that could be brought out of the Navy Yard 
would swing from her anchorage, and the 
question would be decided. You do not 
want a foreign war, and yet I have to tell you 
that this invasion of God's holy day is a for- 
eign war. As among; our own native-born 
population there are two classes — the good 
and the bad ; so it is with the people who 
come from other shores — there are the law- 
abiding and the lawless. The former are wel- 
come here. The more of them the better we 
like it. In this particular church there are 
representatives of all lands. I believe God 
intended our national heart to throb with the 
blood of all people ! But let not the lawless 
come from other shores expecting to break 
down our Sabbath, and institute in the place 
of it a foreign Sabbath. 

How do you feel, ye who have been brought 
6* 



130 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH. 

up amidst the hills of New England, about 
giving up the American Sabbath ? Ye who 
spent your childhood under the shadow of the 
Adirondacks or the Catskills; ye who were 
born on the banks of the Tennessee or Ohio 
or Cumberland, how do you feel about giving 
up the American Sabbath ? You say : " We 
shall not give it up. We mean to defend it, 
as long as there is left any strength in our arm 
or any blood in our heart !" Do not bring 
your Spanish Sabbath here ; do not bring your 
Italian Sabbath here; do not bring your 
French Sabbath here ; do not bring your Ger- 
man Sabbath here. It shall be for us and our 
children forever a pure, consecrated, Christian, 
American Sabbath. 

I will make a comparison between the Sab- 
bath as some of you have known it, and the 
Sabbath of Paris. I speak from observation. 
On Sabbath morning I was aroused in Paris 
by a great sound in the street. I said : 
"What is this?" " Oh," they said, "this is 
Sunday." An unusual rattle of vehicles of 
all sorts. The voices seemed more boisterous 
than on other days. People running to and 



A A f OISY SUNDA Y. 



I3 1 



fro, with baskets and bundles, to get to the 
rail-trains or gardens. It seemed as if all the 
vehicles in Paris, of whatever sort, had turned 
out for the holiday. The Champs .Elysees one 
great mob of pleasure -seeking people. Bal- 
loons flying; parrots chattering; foot -balls 
rolling; peddlers hawking their knickknacks 
through the streets; Punch and Judy shows 
in a score of places, each one with a shout- 
ing audience ; hand-organs, cymbals, and every 
kind of racket, musical and unmusical. When 
the evening came down, all the theatres were 
in full blare of music and full blaze of lisrht. 
The wine stores and saloons were thronged 
with an unusual number of customers. At 
even-tide I stood and watched the excursion- 
ists coming home, fagged out men, women, and 
children, a Gulf Stream of fatigue, irritability, 
and wretchedness ; for I should think it would 
take three or four days to get over that miser- 
able way of Sundaying. It seemed more like 
an American Fourth of July than a Christian 
Sabbath. 

Now, in contrast, I present one of the Sab- 
baths in one of our best American cities. 



i 



132 



THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 



Holy silence coming down with the day dawn. 
Business men more deliberately looking into 
the faces of their children, and talking to them 
about their present and future welfare. Men 
sit longer at the table in the morning, because 
the stores are not to be opened, and the me- 
chanical tools are not to be taken up. A 
hymn is sung. There are congratulation and 
good cheer all through the house. The streets 
silent until ten o'clock, when there is a regular, 
orderly tramp churchward. Houses of God, 
vocal with thanksgivings for mercies received, 
with prayers for comfort, with charities for the 
poor. Rest for the body. Rest for the soul. 
The nerves quieted, the temples cooled, the 
mind cleared, the soul strengthened, and our 
entire population turned out on Monday morn- 
ing ten years younger, better prepared for the 
duties of this life, better prepared for the life 
that is to come. Which do you like best, the 
American Sabbath or the Parisian Sabbath? 
Do you know in what boat the Sabbath came 
across the seas and landed on our shores ? It 
was in the Mayflower. Do you know in what 
boat the Sabbath will leave us, if it ever goes ? 



AFTER THE PLAY. I33 

It will be in the ark that floats over a deluge 
of national iniquity. 

Still further: I protest against this recent 
invasion of the Lord's day, because it wrongs a 
vast multitude of employes of their, rest. The 
play actors and actresses can have their rest 
between their . engagements ; but how about 
the scene ■ shifters, the ballet-dancers, the call- 
boys, the innumerable attendants and super- 
numeraries of the American theatre ? Where 
is their Sunday to come from % They are paid 
small salaries at the best. Alas for them ! 
You see them on the stage in tinsel and tassel 
with halberds, or you see them in gauze whirl- 
ing in toe tortures, and you mistake them for 
fairies or queens; but after twelve o'clock at 
night you may see them trudging through the 
streets in faded dress, shivering and tired, a 
bundle under their arms, seeking their homes 
in the garrets and cellars of the city. Now 
you propose to take from thousands of these em- 
ployes throughout this country, not only all op- 
portunity of moral culture, but all opportunity 
of physical rest. For God's sake, let the crush- 
ing Juggernaut stop at least one day in seven ! ' 



r 34 



THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 



Again : I oppose this modern invasion of 
the Christian Sabbath because it is a war on 
the spiritual welfare of the people. You have 
a body? Yes. You have a mind ? Yes. You 
have a soul ? Yes. Which of the theatres on 
the Sabbath-day will give that soul any cul- 
ture ? I heard of a lady who came to enact a 
play on the boards of a Philadelphia theatre. 
Her conscience so wrought upon her while she 
stood there, that, instead of attending to the 
play, she sang, 

" Eock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in thee." 

It was a rare occurrence. Such things are 
not often witnessed or heard in the American 
theatre. Admitting that a man has a spir- 
itual and immortal nature, which one of the 
theatres will culture it? Which one of the 
Sabbath performances in a theatre will remind 
men of the fact that unless they are born again 
they can not see the kingdom of God ? Will 
the music of La Grand Duchesse help people 
at last to sing the song of the one hundred and 
forty and four thousand ? Let the theatres of 
the country go on Sabbath after Sabbath for 



THE THREE GEMS. I35 

years, and in all that number of years how 
many Christians will they, under God, pro- 
duce % Not one. Besides that, if you gentle- 
men of the theatre and the opera have six days 
in the week in which to exercise your evan- 
gelical and heavenly influence, ought you not 
to allow Christian institutions to have twen- 
ty-four hours ? Is it unreasonable to demand 
that, if you have six days for the body and the 
intellect, we have one day at least for our im- 
mortal soul? Or, to put it in another shape, 
do you not really think that our imperisha- 
ble soul is worth at least one-seventh as much 
as our perishable body? An artist has three 
gems — a cornelian, an amethyst, and a dia- 
mond. He has to cut them and to set them. 
Which one is he most particular about ? Now, 
the cornelian is the body, the amethyst is the 
intellect, the diamond is the soul. For the 
two former you propose six days of opportu- 
nity, while you offer no opportunity at all for 
the last, which is in value as compared with 
the others like one hundred thousand million 
dollars to one farthing. Besides that, you 
must not forget that nine-tenths, ay, ninety- 

m 

S 



1 36 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 

nine one -hundredths of all the Christian ef- 
fort of this country are put forth on the Lord's 
day. That is the clay in which the asylums 
and the hospitals and the prisons are visited 
by Christian men. That is the day when the 
youth of our country get their chief religious 
information. That is the day when the most 
of the charities are collected. That is the day 
when, under the blast of fifty thousand Amer- 
ican pulpits, the sin of the land is assaulted 
and men are summoned to repent. When you 
make war upon any part of God's clay, you 
make war upon the asylums, and the peniten- 
tiaries, and the hospitals, and the reform asso- 
ciations, and the homes of the destitute, and 
the Church of the living God, which is the pil- 
lar and the ground of the truth. 

I am opposed to the invasion of the Sab- 
bath, because it is a war on our political insti- 
tutions. When the Sabbath goes down, the 
republic goes down. Men who are not will- 
ing to obey God's law in regard to Sabbath 
observance are not fit to govern themselves. 
Sabbath -breaking means dissoluteness, and 
dissoluteness is incompatible with self-govern- 



A TERRIBLE YOUNG MAN. 



137 



merit. What is the matter with republicanism 
in Italy and in SjDain ? No Sabbath. For 
ages they wanted a republic in France. After 
a while they got a republic ; but one day Na- 
poleon III., with his cavalry, rode through the 
streets, and down went the republic under the 
clattering hoofs. They have a republic there 
again; but every time a sick young man at 
Chiselhurst looks across the English Channel, 
the French government quakes from the Tui- 
leries to Versailles. France never will have a 
permanent republic until she quits her royster- 
ing Sabbaths, and devotes one clay in every 
week to the recognition of God and sacred 
institutions. Abolish the Sabbath, and you 
abolish your religious privileges. Let the bad 
work go on, and you have "the commune," 
and you have " the revolution," and you have 
the sun of national prosperity going down in 
darkness and blood. From that rei«;n of ter- 
ror may the God of Lexington and Gettysburg 
deliver us ! 

Still further : I am opposed to this invasion 
of the Sabbath because it is unfair, and it is 
partial. Why has it been during the past 



138 THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH. 

few weeks that some of the theatres have 
been allowed to be open and others not ? 
Why not have all open ? While some of the 
operas and theatres were open, some of our 
friends in the other theatres, although they 
were willing to bless society on Sunday with 
their dances and their farces, had to sit in 
their " greenrooms," chewing their beards, and 
" wasting; their sweetness on the desert air." 

Go further, and see how unfair it is. While 
operas and theatres in different cities are al- 
lowed to be open on the Sabbath-day, dry- 
goods establishments must be closed, and 
plumbing establishments, and the butcher's 
and the baker's, and the shoe-maker's and the 
hardware stores. Now tell me by what law 
of justice you compel me to shut the door of 
my store while you keep open the door of 
your theatre ? Are the men and women con- 
nected with the theatrical profession so much 
better than other people, that you give them 
especial privilege \ Are the ballet-girls better 
than the milliners ? Are these men who stalk 
the stage, clutching bloody daggers and writ- 
ing death-warrants with quills that have no 



FAIR PI A Y DEMANDED. 139 



ink in them, and manufacturing thunder with 
a Chinese gong — are they "better than people 
who sell silks and harness and cutlery? La- 
dies and gentlemen of the theatre and opera, 
in what school did you get morals so far su- 
perior to all the rest of the people ? May it 
please your honors, Judges of the Supreme 
Court, when you give to the opera and the 
theatre the right to be open on the Sabbath- 
day, you ought to give, at the same time, the 
rio^ht to all commercial establishments to be 
open, and to all mechanical establishments to 
be open. What is right in the one case is 
light in all the cases. But come now and 
be honest, you men who manage theatres and 
operas, and confess that you do not care any 
thino^ at all about the moral welfare of the 
people, but you only want more dollars. In- 
deed, the leader of one of the operas says in 
the public prints that unless he can have the 
theatre open on the Lord's day he can not af- 
ford to keep it running. We are told by the 
operatic and theatrical leaders that they must 
get money on Sabbath nights in order to pay 
the deficits of the other nights of the week. 



140 



THEATRICAL INVASION OF THE SABBATH 



Now, in answer to that I say that if men can 
not manage our theatres without breaking the 
Lord's clay, they had better all go into bank- 
ruptcy together. We will never surrender 
our Christian Sabbath for the purpose of help- 
ing these violators pay their expenses. While 
there may be a difference of opinion among 
some people about the propriety of having 
theatricals during the week, I think all lovers 
of good order must unite in one solid, unani- 
mous resistance to this infernal attempt to 
massacre the Christian Sabbath. 

I congratulate our city that so far we have 
almost entirely escaped the invasion, and my 
confidence is in our mayor and our judges and 
our police officers that the laws of the State 
of New York will be executed. Above all, 
my confidence is in the good hand of God that 
has been over this city since its foundation. 
But I call this day upon all those who be- 
friend Christian principles, and those who love 
our political freedom, to stand in solid phalanx 
in this Thermopylae of our American history ; 
for I believe as certainly as I stand here that 
the triumph or overthrow of American insti- 



NO ROOM FOR COWARDS. 



141 



tutions depends upon this Sabbatic contest. 
Bring your voices, your pens, your printing- 
presses, and your pulpits into the Lord's artil- 
lery corps for the defense of our holy day. 
Decree before high Heaven that this war on 
your religious rights and the cradles of your 
children shall bring ignominious defeat to the 
enemies of God .and the public weal. For 
those who die in the contest battling for the 
right we shall chisel the epitaph : " These are 
they who came out of great tribulation, and 
had their robes washed and made white in 
the blood of the Lamb." But for that one 
who shall prove in this moral crisis recreant 
to God and the Church there shall be no hon- 
orable epitaph. He shall not be worthy even 
of a burial-place in all this free land ; but per- 
haps some steam -tug, at midnight, may carry 
out his poor remains and drop them in the sea, 
where the lawless winds which keep no Sun- 
clay will gallop over the grave of him who 
lived and died a traitor to Gocl, the Church, 
and the free institutions of America. Long 
live the Christian Sabbath ! Perish forever 
all attempts to overthrow it ! 



1 42 THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 



THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 

"Who slew all these ?"— 2 Kings x. ; 10. 

I SEE a long row of baskets coming up to- 
ward the palace of King Jehu. I am some- 
what inquisitive to find out what is in the bas- 
kets. I look in, and I find the gory heads of 
seventy slain princes. As the baskets arrive 
at the gate of the palace, the heads are thrown 
into two heaps, one on either side the gate. 
In the morning the king comes out, and he 
looks upon the bleeding, ghastly heads of the 
massacred princes. Looking on either side the 
gate, he cries out, with a ringing emphasis, 
" Who slew all these ?" 

We have, my friends, lived to see a more 
fearful massacre. There is no use of my tak- 
ing your time this morning in trying to give 
you statistics about the devastation and ruin 
and the death which strong drink has wrought 
in this country. Statistics do not seem to 
mean any thing. We are so hardened under 



THE QUESTION ANSWERED. I43 

these statistics that the fact that fifty thousand 
more men are slain, or fifty thousand less men 
are slain, seems to make no positive impression 
on the public mind. Suffice it to say, that in- 
temperance has slain an innumerable company 
of princes — the children of God's royal family ; 
and at the gate of the Church there are two 
heaps of the slain; and at the door of the 
household there are two heaps of the slain; 
and at the door of the legislative hall there 
are two heaps of the slain ; and at the door of 
the university there are two heaps of the slain ; 
and at the gate of this, nation there are two 
heaps of the slain. When I look upon the 
desolation, I am almost frantic with the scene, 
while I cry out, " Who slew all these V I 
can answer that question in half a minute. 
The ministers of Christ who have given no 
warning, the courts of law that have offered 
the licensure, the women who give strong drink 
on New-year's- day, the fathers and mothers 
who have rum on the sideboard, the hundreds 
of thousands of Christian men and women in 
the land who are stolid in their indifference 
on this subject — they slew all these ! 



1 44 THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 

Last Sabbath morning I talked to you about 
some of the modes by which drunkenness in 
this land was to be assaulted. I shall this 
morning come to a more specific subject, and 
tell you what I think are the sorrows and the 
doom of the drunkard, so that you to whom I 
speak may not come to the place of torment. 

Some one says, "You had better let those 
subjects alone." Why, my brethren, we would 
be glad to let them alone if they would let us 
alone ; but when I have in my pocket now four 
requests saying, " Pray for my husband, j3ray 
for my son, pray for my brother, pray for my 
friend, who is the captive of strong drink," I 
reply, we are ready to let that question alone 
when it is willing to let us alone ; but when 
it stands blocking up the way to heaven, and 
keeping multitudes who are in the house of 
God this morning away from Christ and 
heaven, I dare not be silent, lest the Lord re- 
quire their blood at my hands. 

I think the subject has been kept back very 
much by the merriment people make over 
those slain by strong drink. I used to be very 
merry over these things, having a keen sense 



THE GROTESQUE DRUNKARD. I45 

of the ludicrous. There was something very 
grotesque in the gait of a drunkard. It is not 
so now; for I saw in one of the streets of 
Philadelphia a sight that changed the whole 
subject to me. There was a young man being 
led home. He was very much intoxicated — 
he was raving with intoxication. Two young 
men were leading him along. The boys hoot- 
ed in the street, men laughed, women sneered ; 
but I happened to be very near the door where 
he went in — it was the door of his father's 
house. I saw him go up stairs. I heard him 
shouting, hooting, and blaspheming. He had 
lost his hat, and the merriment increased with 
the mob until he came up to the door, and 
as the door was opened his mother came out. 
When I heard her cry, that took all the com- 
edy away from the scene. Since that time, 
when I see a man walking through the street, 
reeling, as I -saw one last night, until he fell to 
the sidewalk here on Lafayette Avenue, the 
comedy is all gone, and it is a tragedy of tears 
and groans and heart-breaks. Never make any 
fun around me about the grotesqueness of a 
drunkard. Alas for his home ! 

7 



146 THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 

The first suffering of the drunkard is in the 
loss of his good name. God has so arranged it 
that no man ever loses his good name except 
through his own act. All the hatred of men 
and all the assaults of devils can not destroy 
a man's good name, if he really maintains his 
integrity. If a man is honest and pure and 
Christian, God looks after him. Although he 
may be bombarded for twenty or thirty years, 
his integrity is never lost and his good name 
is never sacrificed. No force on earth or in 
hell can capture such a Gibraltar. But when 
it is said of a man, " He drinks," and it can be 
proved, then what store wants him for a clerk ? 
what church wants him for a member? who 
will trust him? what dying man would ap- 
point him his executor? He may have been 
forty years in building up his reputation — it 
goes down. Letters of recommendation, the 
backing up of business firms, a brilliant an- 
cestry can not save him. The world shies off. 
Why ? It is whispered all through the com- 
munity, " He drinks ; he drinks." That blasts 
him. When a young man loses his reputation 
for sobriety, he might as well be at the bottom 



BEGINNING LIFE. 



147 



of the sea. There are young men here who 
have their good name as their only capital. 
Your father started you out in city life. He 
could only give you an education. He gave 
you no means. He started you, however, un- 
der Christian influences. You have come to 
the city. You are now achieving your own 
fortune, under God, by your own right arm. 
Now look out, young man, that there is no 
doubt of your sobriety. Do not create any 
suspicion by going in and out of liquor estab- 
lishments, or by any odor of your breath, or 
by any glare of your eye, or by any unnatural 
flush of your cheek. You can not afford to do 
it, for your good name is your only capital, and 
when that is blasted with the reputation of 
taking strong drink, all is gone. When I see 
the influences all around our young men to 
destroy them, I hardly know what to say. 
For the young men themselves, all compas- 
sion, and all sympathy. For the men who 
deal out the deadly stuff I have all pity, be- 
cause they bring upon themselves the scorn 
of good society and the retribution of God ; 
but for the liquor establishments themselves, 



148 THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 

and the rum -selling restaurants, may God Al- 
mighty consume them with the brightness of 
his coming ! 

Another loss which the inebriate suffers is 
that of self-respect. Just as soon as a man 
wakes up and finds that he is the captive of 
strong drink, he feels demeaned. I do not 
care how reckless he acts. He may say, " I 
don't care ;" he does care. He can not look a 
pure man in the eye, unless it is with positive 
force of resolution. Three -fourths of his na- 
ture is destroyed; his self-respect gone; he 
says things he would not otherwise say ; he 
does things he would not otherwise do. When 
a man is nine-tenths gone with strong drink, 
the first thing he wants to do is to persuade 
you that he can stop any time he wants to. 
He can not. The Philistines have bound him 
hand and foot, and shorn his locks, and put 
out his eyes, and are making him grind in the 
mill of a great horror. He can not stop. I 
will prove it. He knows that his course is 
bringing disgrace and ruin upon himself. He 
loves himself. If he could stop, he would. 
He knows his course is bringing ruin upon 



THE AWFUL IMPOSSIBILITY. 



149 



his family. He loves them. He would stop 
if he could. He can not. Perhaps he could 
three months or a year ago; not now. Just 
ask him to stop for a month. He can not; 
he knows he can not, so he does not try. I 
had a friend who for fifteen years was going 
down under this evil habit. He had large 
means. He had given thousands of dollars to 
Bible societies and reformatory institutions of 
all sorts. He was very genial and very gen- 
erous and very lovable, and whenever he talk- 
ed about this evil habit he would say, " I can 
stop any time." But he kept going on, going 
on, down, down, down. His family would say, 
" I wish you would stop." " Why," he would 
reply, " I can stop any time if I want to." Af- 
ter a while he had delirium tremens; he had 
it twice ; and yet after that he said, " I could 
stop at any time if I wanted to." He is dead 
now. What killed him ? Eum ! Rum ! And 
yet among his last utterances was, "I can stop 
at any time." He did not stop it, because he 
could not stop it. Oh, I want the young men 
of my congregation to realize the fact that 
there is a point in inebriation beyond which, 
if a man goes, he can not stop ! 



IS© 



THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 



One of these victims said to a Christian 
man, " Sir, if I were told that I couldn't get 
a drink until to-morrow night unless I had all 
my fingers cut off, I would say, * Bring the 
hatchet and cut them off now.' " . I have a 
dear friend in Philadelphia, whose nephew 
came to him one day, and when he was ex- 
horted about his evil habit, said, "Uncle, I 
can't give it up. If there stood a cannon, and 
it- was loaded, and a glass of wine set on the 
mouth of that cannon, and I knew that you 
would fire it off just as I came up and took 
the glass, I would start, for I must have it." 
Oh, it is a sad thing for a man to wake up in 
this life and feel that he is a captive. He 
says, " I could have got rid of this once, but I 
can't now. I might have lived an honorable 
life and died a Christian death ; but there is 
no hope for me now; there is no escape for 
me. Dead, but not buried. I am a walking 
corpse. I am an apparition of what I once 
was. I am a caged immortal, beating against 
the wires of my cage in this direction and in 
that direction ; beating against the cage until 
there is blood on the wires and blood upon 



HOLL OW LA UGHTER. 



151 



my soul, yet not able to get out. Destroyed 
without remedy I" 

I go farther, and say that the inebriate suf- 
fers from the loss of Ms usefulness. Do you 
not recognize the fact that many of those who 
are now captives of strong drink only a little 
while ago were foremost in churches and in 
reformatory institutions? Do you not know 
that sometimes they knelt in the family circle? 
Do you not know that they prayed in public, 
and some of them carried around the holy 
wine on sacramental days ? Oh yes, they 
stood in the very front rank ; but they gradu- 
ally fell away. And now, what do you sup- 
pose is the feeling of such a man as that, when 
he thinks of his dishonored vows and the dis- 
honored sacrament, when he thinks of what 
he might have been and of what he is now ? 
Do such men laugh, and seem very merry? 
Ah, there is, down in the depths of their soul, 
a very heavy weight. Do not wonder that 
they sometimes say strange things, and act 
very roughly in the household. You would 
not blame them at all, if you knew what they 
suffer. Do not tell such that there is no fti- 



152 



THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 



ture punishment. Do not tell him there is 
no such place as hell. He knows there is. 
He is there now ! 

I go on, and say that the inebriate suffers 
from the loss of physical health. The older 
m.en in the congregation may remember that 
some years ago Dr. Sewell went through this 
country and electrified the people by his lec- 
tures, in which he showed the effects of alco- 
hol on the human stomach. He had seven or 
eight diagrams, by which he showed the dev- 
astation of strong drink upon the physical sys- 
tem. There were thousands of people that 
turned back from that ulcerous sketch, swear- 
ing eternal abstinence from every thing that 
could intoxicate. 

God only knows what the drunkard suffers. 
Pain files on every nerve, and travels every 
muscle, and gnaws every bone, and burns 
with every flame, and stings with every poi- 
son, and pulls at him with every torture. 
What reptiles crawl over his creeping limbs ! 
What fiends stand by his midnight pillow! 
What groans tear his ear ! What horrors 
shiver through his soul ! Talk of the rack, 



A WALKING LAZAR-HOUSE. 



*53 



talk of the Inquisition, talk of the funeral 
pyre, talk of the crushing Juggernaut — he 
feels them all at once. Have you ever been 
in the ward of the hospital where these ine- 
briates are dying, the stench of their wounds 
driving back the attendants, their voices 
sounding through the night? The keeper 
comes up and says, " Hush, now, be still ! 
Stop making all this noise !" But it is effect- 
ual only for a moment, for as soon as the 
keeper is gone they begin again, " Oh God ! 
oh God ! Help ! help ! Rum ! Give me 
rum! Help! Take them off me! Take 
them off me! Oh God!" And then they 
shriek, and they rave, and they pluck out 
their hair by handfuls, and bite their nails 
into the quick, and then they groan, and they 
shriek, and they blaspheme, and they ask the 
keepers to kill them : " Stab me. Smother 
me. Strangle me. Take the devils off me !" 
Oh, it is no fancy sketch. That thing is going 
on in hospitals ; ay, it is going on in some of 
the finest private residences in the city of 
Brooklyn to-day. It went on last night while 
you slept; and I tell you further that this is 

7* 



*54 



THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 



going to be the death that some of you will 
die. I know it. I see it coming. 

Again : the inebriate suffers through tlie loss 
of Ms home. I do not care how much he loves 
his wife and children ; if this passion for strong 
drink has mastered him, he will do the most 
outrageous things; and if he could not get 
drink in any other way, he would sell his fam- 
ily into eternal bondage. How many homes 
in our city have been broken up in that way 
no one but God knows. 

Oh, is there any thing that will so destroy 
a man for this life and damn him for the life 
that is to come? I hate that strong drink. 
"With all the concentred energies of my soul, 
I hate it. Do you tell me that a man can be 
happy when he kilows that he is breaking his 
wife's heart, and clothing his children with 
rags \ Why, there are on the streets of our 
city to-day little children, barefooted, uncomb- 
ed, and unkempt — want on every patch of their 
faded dress, and on every wrinkle of their 
prematurely old countenance, who would have 
been in churches to-day, and as well clad as 
you are, but for the fact that rum destroyed 



THE ETERNAL PAUPER. 



155 



their parents and drove them into the grave. 
Oh rum ! thou foe of God, thou despoiler of 
homes, thou recruiting-officer of the pit, I hate 
thee ! 

But my subject takes a deeper tone, and 
that is, that the inebriate suffers from the loss 
of the soul. The Bible intimates that in the 
future world, if we are unforgiven here, our 
bad passions and appetites unrestrained, will 
go along with us and make our torment there. 
So that I suppose, when an inebriate wakes up 
in the lost world, he will feel an infinite thirst 
clawing on him. Now, down in the world, al- 
though he may have been very poor, he could 
beg or he could steal five cents with which to 
get that which would slake his thirst for a lit- 
tle while ; but in eternity, where is the rum to 
come from ? Dives could not get one drop of 
water. From what chalice of eternal fire will 
the hot lips of the drunkard drain his draught? 
No one to brew it. No one to mix it. No 
one to pour it. No one to fetch it. Millions 
of worlds then for the dregs which the young 
man just now slung on the saw-dusted floor of 
the restaurant. Millions of worlds now for 



156 THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 

the rind thrown out from the punch -bowl of 
an earthly banquet. Dives cried for water. 
The inebriate cries for rum. Oh, the deep, ex- 
hausting, exasperating, everlasting thirst of the 
drunkard in hell ! Why, if a fiend came up 
to earth for some infernal work in a grog-shop, 
and should go back taking on its wing just one 
drop of that for which the inebriate in the lost 
world longs, what excitement it would make 
there ! Put that one drop from off the fiend's 
wing on the tip of the tongue of the destroyed 
inebriate : let the liquid brightness just touch 
it ; let the drop be very small, if it only have 
in it the smack of alcoholic drink; let that 
drop just touch the lost inebriate in the lost 
world, and he would spring to his feet and cry, 
"That is rum, aha ! that is rum I" And it would 
wake up the echoes of the damned, " Give me 
rum ! Give me rum ! Give me rum !" In 
the future world I do not believe that it will 
be the absence of God that will make the 
drunkard's sorrow, I do not believe that it will 
be the absence of light, I do not believe that 
it will be the absence of holiness ; I think it 
will be the absence of rum. Oh ! " look not 



THE DIFFERENT REGIMENTS. 



157 



upon the wine when it is red, when it moveth 
itself aright in the cup, for at the last it biteth 
like a serpent, and it stingeth like an adder." 
When I see establishments all round about 
us the influence of which is to destroy men 
for this life and the life that is to come, I feel 
sometimes indignant, sometimes humiliated. 
Sometimes one emotion is dominant, and some- 
times another ; but if you should ask me this 
morning, " What are you in favor of for the 
purpose of extirpating this evil ?" I would say, 
I am ready for any thing that seems reason- 
able. You say, "Are you in favor of Sons of 
Temperance?" Yes. "Are you in favor of 
Good Templars?" Yes. "Are you in favor 
of Good Samaritans V Yes. "Are you in fa- 
vor of the Maine Liquor Law ?" Yes. "Are 
you in favor of the women's movement at the 
West?" Yes. Yes. I think that if thirty 
women, baptized by the Holy Spirit, in the 
West, could drive out all the liquor from a 
village of one thousand inhabitants, then if 
we could have in this great city three thou- 
sand consecrated women (for in proportion as 
the castle is great and strong you must have 



I5 8 THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 

troops), resolving to give themselves no peace 
until this crime was extirpated from the city, 
in six months three-fourths of the grog-shops 
would be gone. If there be three thousand 
women now in this city who will put their 
hands and their hearts to the work, I will take 
the contract for driving out all these moral nui- 
sances from the city — at any rate three-fourths 
of them — in three months. If, when that host 
of three thousand consecrated women is mar- 
shaled, there be not one to lead them, then, as 
a minister of the Most Hi^h God, I will offer 
to take my position at the front of the host, 
and I will cry to them, " Come on, ye women 
of Christ, with your songs and your prayers ! 
Some of you take the enemy's right wing, and 
some the left wing. Forward ! The Lord of 
Hosts is with us ; the Grod of Jacob is our ref- 
uge ! Down with the dram-shops !" 

But while I have been talking, last Sabbath 
and somewhat now, about the general evils, I 
want, in conclusion, to say one thing personal, 
for I do not like a sermon that has no person- 
alities in it. Perhaps this has not had that 
fault already. I want to say, in the first place, 



STOMACH AND HEART CHANGED. 



159 



to those who are the victims of strong drink, 
that while I declared some time ago that there 
was a point beyond which a man could not 
stop, I want to tell you that while a man can 
not stop in his own strength, the Lord God, by 
his grace, can help him to stop at any time. 

Last summer I was in a room in New York 
where there were many men who had been re- 
claimed from drunkenness. I heard their tes- 
timony, and for the first time in my life there 
flashed out a truth I never understood. They 
said, " We were victims of strong drink. We 
tried to give it up, but always failed ; but some- 
how, since we gave our hearts to Christ, he has 
taken care of us." I believe that the time will 
soon come when the grace of God will show its 
power here not only to save man's soul, but 
his body, and reconstruct, purify, elevate, and 
redeem it. 

I verily believe that, although you feel grap- 
pling at the roots of your tongues an almost 
omnipotent thirst, if you will this morning 
give your heart to God he will help you, by 
his grace, to conquer. Try it. It is your last 
chance. I have looked off upon the desola- 



160 THE WHOLESALE SLAUGHTER. 

tion. Sitting under my ministry there are a 
good many people in awful peril ; and, judg- 
ing from ordinary circumstances, there is not 
one chance in five thousand that they will get 
clear of it. I see men in my congregation 
from Sabbath to Sabbath, my warm, personal 
friends, of whom I must make the remark that, 
if they do not change their course, within ten 
years they will, as to their bodies, lie down in 
drunkards' graves ; and, as to their souls, lie 
down in a drunkard's perdition. I know that 
is an awful thing to say, but I can not help 
saying it. Oh, beware ! You have not yet 
been captured. Beware ! As you open the 
door of your wine -closet at noon to-day, may 
that decanter flash out upon you, " Beware !" 
and when you pour the beverage into the 
glass, in the foam at the top, in white letters, 
let there be spelled out to your soul, " Beware !" 
When the books of judgment are open, and ten 
million drunkards come up to get their doom, 
I want you to bear witness that I, this morn- 
ing, in the fear of God, and in the love for your 
soul, told you, with all affection and with all 
kindness, to beware of that which has already 



THE DISMAL TERMINUS. 161 

exerted its influence upon your family, blow- 
ing out some of its lights — a premonition of 
the blackness of darkness forever. Oh, if you 
could only hear this morning Intemperance, 
with drunkards' bones, drumming on the head 
of the wine-cask the "Dead March" of immor- 
tal souls, methinks the very glance of a wine- 
cup would make you shudder, and the color of 
the liquor would make you think of the blood 
of the soul, and the foam on the top of the cup 
would remind you of the froth on the maniac's 
lip ; and you would go home from this service 
and kneel down and pray God that, rather 
than your children should become captives of 
this evil habit, you would like to carry them 
out some bright spring day to Greenwood, and 
put them away to the last sleep, until at the 
call of the south wind the flowers would come 
up all over the grave — sweet prophecies of 
the resurrection. God has a balm for such a 
wound ; but what flower of comfort ever grew 
on the blasted heath of a drunkard's sepul- 
chre ? 



l$2 THE CRUSADE OF DEMONS. 



THE CKUSADE OF DEMONS. 

[The Temperance League of Glasgow, Scotland, publish an- 
nually a Xew-year's Tract. The following was written at the 
solicitation of that society.] 

1VTOT with the click and clang of glasses and 
-L * decanters, but with the stroke of the bells 
of English chapel, Scotch kirk, and Ameri- 
can church, all mingling in one chime, would 
we ring the old year out and the new year 
in. Putting the palm of my hand against the 
palm of yours, and clenching the fingers on 
the back part of the hand, and then jerking 
my arm backward so as to bring you a lit- 
tle farther over this way, I give you a warm- 
hearted Christian grip, and wish you a Happy 
New-year. 

I accept with pleasure the invitation of the 
Scottish Temperance League to write their an- 
nual tract, for I am by blood partly a Scotch- 
man, have high cheek-bones, and am very stub- 
born when I think I am right. Now that the 



RUM FOR FOREIGNERS. 163 

steamers are crowded with Scotchmen, En- 
glishmen, and Irishmen coming to America, I 
must give a word of warning. Stop drinking 
before you come ! Our climate and style of 
liquors soon swamp or kill your country men. 
Moderate drinkers in Britain soon become im- 
moderate drinkers here. The same amount of 
rum that in your own country will make you 
exhilarant, will turn you into a gutter-inspector 
here. There is something in our climate to 
rush a man to ruin quicker, if he be on the 
wrong track. Besides that, I think we put 
more blue vitriol, potash, turpentine, copperas, 
and stramonium in our liquors than you do in 
yours. Oh, you ought to taste our Cognac and 
Old Otard ! Some one declares the fondness 
of different nationalities for strong drink by 
saying, when Frenchman meets Frenchman, he 
takes wine; when German meets German, he 
takes beer; when Englishman meets English- 
man, he takes ale ; when Irishman meets Irish- 
man, he takes whisky: but when American 
meets American, he takes the first thing he 
can lay his hands on. We have noticed that 
people of other lands coming here soon get our 



1 64 THE CRUSADE OF DEMONS. 

bad habits, and make quicker plunge than our 
own natives. Come, by all means ! We want 
to see you — but leave your ale-pitcher at, borne. 

Your land, like our own, swelters under the 
curse of strong drink, and it is time that we 
all take up arms against it." From the way 
men are everywhere mown down by this evil, 
it is evident that there must be a banded and 
organized effort against the world's sobriety. 
I think the original Liquor League was formed 
in the lower world. One day the bad spirits 
met together and resolved that our human 
race were too happy, and a delegation of four 
infernals was sent up to earth on embassy of 
mischief. One spirit said, " I will take charge 
of the vineyards !" Another said, " I will look 
after the grain-fields !" Another said, " I will 
supervise the dairy !" Another said, " I will 
take charge of the music!" They landed in 
the Great Sahara Desert, clutched their skele- 
ton fingers in a handshake of fidelity, kissed 
each other good-bye with lip of blue flame, and 
separated for their mission. 

The first spirit entered the vineyard one 
bright morning, and sat down on the twisted 



THE VINEYARDS DESPOILED. 



165 



root of a grape-vine in sheer discouragement. 
He could not at first plan any harm for the 
vineyard. The clusters were so full and pur- 
ple and luscious and pure. The air was fairly 
bewitched with their sweetness ; health seemed 
to breathe from every ripened bunch. But in 
wrath at so much loveliness, the fiend grasped 
a cluster in his right hand, and squeezed it 
with utter hate, and lo ! his hand was red with 
the liquid, and began to smoke. Then the 
fiend laughed, and said, as he looked at the 
crimson stream dripping from his hand, " That 
makes me think of the blood of broken hearts. 
I will strip the vineyard, and squeeze out all 
the clusters, and let the juices stand till they 
rot, and will call the process ' Fermentation.' " 
And a great vat was made, and men seeing it, 
brought cups and pitchers and dipped them, 
and went off, drinking as they went, till they 
dropped in long lines of death ; so that when 
the fiend of the vineyards wanted to go back 
to his home in the pit, he trod on the bodies 
of the slain all the way, going down over a 
causeway of the dead. 

The fiend of the grain-field waded chin-deep 



1 66 THE CRUSADE OF DEMONS. 

through the barley and the rye. As he came 
in, he found all the grain talking about bread, 
and prosperous husbandmen, and thrifty 
homes. But the fiend thrust his long arms 
through the barley and rye, and pulled them 
up and flung them into the water, and kindled 
fires beneath by a spark from his own heart, 
and there was a grinding, and a mashing, and 
a stench. And men dipped their bottles into 
the fiery juice, and staggered, and blasphemed, 
and rioted, and fought, and murdered, till the 
fiend of the grain -field was so well pleased 
with their behavior, he changed his residence 
from the pit to a whisky-barrel ; and there he 
sits by the door-way, at the bung-hole, laugh- 
ing right merrily at the fact that out of so 
harmless a thing as barley and rye he has 
made this world a suggestion of Pandemonium. 
The fiend of the dairy met the cows as they 
were coming u]3, full-uddered, from the pas- 
ture-field. As the maid milked, he said, "It 
will not take me long to spoil that mess. I 
will add to it some brandy and sugar and nut- 
meg, and stir them up into a milk-punch, and 
children will like it, and even temperance men 



DISCORD SOUNDED. ^7 

will take it ; and if I can do no more, I will 
make their heads ache, and hand them gradu- 
ally over to the more vigorous fiends of the 
Satanic delegation." And then he danced a 
break- down on the shelf of the dairy till all 
the shining row of milk-pans quaked. 

The fiend of music entered a grog-shop, and 
found the customers few. So he made circuit 
of the city, and gathered up all the instru- 
ments of sweet sound, and after the night 
had fallen he marshaled a band, and trombone 
blew, and cymbals clapped, and harp thrum- 
med, and drum beat, and bugle called, and 
crowds thronged in and listened, and, with 
wine-cup in their right hand, began to whirl 
in a dance that grew wilder and stronger and 
rougher, till the room shook and the glasses 
cracked, and the floor broke through, and the 
crowd dropped into hell. 

They had done their work so well, these 
fiends of vineyard and grain-field, and dairy, 
and concert-saloon, that, on getting back, high 
carnival was held, Satan from his throne an- 
nouncing the fact that there was no danger of 
the earth's redemption so long as the vine- 



1 68 THE CRUSADE OF DEMONS. 

yards and orchards and grain-fields and music 
paid such large tax to the diabolic. Then all 
the satyrs and spirits and demons cried Hear ! 
hear ! and, lifting their chalices of fire, drank 
" Long life to rum-sellers ! Prosperity to the 
gallows ! Success to the License Law !" 

In view of the devastations of strong drink, 
my first word is to toilers of brain, or hand, 
or foot ! God intended us all to be busy. 
The sun and the moon in six thousand years 
have rested only part of a day, and then it 
took a miracle to stop them. Nothing that 
God ever made, animate or inanimate, human 
or angelic, can afford to quit work. But the 
outlay of human energy often leads to inebri- 
ation. Men have so much to do that they 
think they must have artificial stimulus. 
Vast multitudes of professional men have 
found their nervous system exhausted, and 
their brain lethargic, and have resorted to this 
dangerous help. Now what a man can not 
do without perpetual stimulant I do not be- 
lieve he ought to do. You are responsible for 
no more strength than that which you have 
in your arm, and for no more speed than you 



STIMULATED WORKERS. 169 

have in your foot, and for no more vivaci- 
ty than you have in your brain. God asks 
no more, and the world has a right to expect 
no more. Notwithstanding this, some of the 
most brilliant men in the law and medicine, 
yea, even in the ministry, have fallen over- 
board. It will be a glorious day for Britain 
and the United States when all their profes- 
sional men and artisans shall throw the bottle 
out of the back window. It may require a 
struggle; but what great and grand and glo- 
rious thing was ever done without a struggle ? 
Let not the descendants of men who fell at 
Drum clog and Bothwell Bridge talk complain- 
ingly about sacrifices ! 

My next word is to parents ! If I can per- 
suade you that your present course of taking 
intoxicating liquor in the slightest, yea, in the 
ten -thousandth part of a risk, imperils your 
boys, you will knock out the end of your ale- 
keg, and pull out the corks of your wine-bottle, 
to let the beverage, which hitherto has made 
your lips smack, go into the ditch. You say 
you have never been harmed by it. Granted. 
But remember what I tell you this first day of 

8 



170 



THE CRUSADE OF DEMONS. 



January, 1875. That if you proceed with 
your present idea about intoxicating liquors, 
the probability is your son John, or George, 
or Peter, or Henry, or James, or Frederick will 
break your heart with his dissipations. Do 
not let them be familiar with the odors of the 
wine-closet. Do not let them take the sugar 
from the bottom of the glass. Abstain not 
only for yourself, but for your children. Oh, 
father, if in the last hour of your life you can 
take the hand of your son and say, " Farewell ! 
I thank God that I can trust my name and my 
property, and the defense of your mother in 
your keeping. I thank God that lie ever gave 
me such a boy as you are !" in that hour you 
will be more than compensated for any self- 
sacrifice of appetite that you have made for his 
welfare. But suppose you should, on the oth- 
er hand, come to stand at the death-couch of a 
dissipated son, and he should say, " I am lost ! 
Father, you are to blame. You drank, and I 
thought you could do no wrong. But the 
habit which I learned in our sitting-room on 
winter nights at the entertainment of friends 
has been my destruction !" Ah ! in such an 



THE BAD FASHION. 



171 



hour a pile of beer-barrels high as heaven and 
deep as hell could not barricade your soul 
against remorse and chagrin unutterable. 

My next word is to the fashionable and ele- 
gant ! Beastly drunkenness is no temptation. 
But when intoxication fills its cut-glass or 
golden chalice under blazing chandelier and 
before flashing mirror, graceful gentlemen bow- 
ing to gay lady as they click the rim, then the 
thing is bewitching. Though the heavens fall, 
we must be in the fashion. The wedding-hour, 
when two immortals join their fate in holy al- 
liance, and when, of all other occasions, hearts 
should be purest, yea, the wedding -hour has 
often been the starting-place of a dissipation 
which ended not until he who took the vows 
had fallen under the all-consuming influence 
of strong drink, and she who, among the throng 
of congratulating hearts, in clear, sweet voice 
promised, " I will I" had wandered out in the 
cold winter night, and from the abutment of 
a bridge looked down into the glassy water, 
and then, in hope of relief from earthly agonies, 
took a wild leap into the wave. 

My last word is to temperance men of 



I7 2 THE. CRUSADE OF DEMONS. 

Britain ! To arms ! I sound the tocsin of a 
war compared with which Sedan and Waterloo 
and ■Gettysburg were child's play. While we 
do not underrate the foe, let us not limit the 
power of the God in whose cause we have en- 
listed. The flas; we bear -is not stained with 
tears or blood. No skeletons will be found in 
the track of the host who march out for the 
defense of the right ; but in the wake of this 
army of philanthropists will smile the harvests 
of reformed inebriates, and be heard the shout 
of children at the return of their fathers from 
the captivity of the wine -cup. "The mount- 
ains and the hills shall break forth into sing- 
ing, and all the trees of the Held shall clap 
their hands." 

On the first day of January, some years 
ago, our Abraham Lincoln made proclamation 
of emancipation for all bondmen of my own 
country. Would God that on the first day of 
January, 1875, there might go forth in En- 
gland, Scotland, and Ireland a proclamation of 
emancipation for all the slaves of strong drink ! 
That would make the happiest of all happy 
New -years. God save the Queen ! and give 
long life and peace to all her subjects ! 



AN UNWISE ECONOMIST. 



173 



THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

"Many of them also which used curious arts brought their 
bocks together, and burned tbeni before all men; and they 
counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of 
silver." — Acts xix., 19. 

PAUL had been stirring up Ephesus with 
some lively sermons about the sins of that 
place. Among the more important results 
was the fact that the citizens brought out their 
bad books, and in a public place made a bon- 
fire of them. I see the people coming out with 
their arms full of Ephesian literature and toss- 
ing it into the flames. I see an economist 
standing by, and hear him saying, " Stop this 
waste. Here are seven thousand iive hundred 
dollars' worth of books; do you propose to 
burn them all up ? If you don't want to read 
them yourselves, sell them, and let somebody 
else read them." " No," said the people, " if 
these books are not good for us, they are not 
good for any body else, and we shall stand 
and watch until the last leaf has turned to 



i74 



THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 



ashes. They have done us a world of harm, 
and they shall never do others harm." Hear 
the flames crackle and roar ! 

Well, my friends, one of the wants of the 
cities of this country is a great bonfire of bad 
books and newspapers. We have enough fuel 
to make a blaze two hundred feet high. Many 
of the publishing-houses would do well to dump 
into the blaze their entire stock of goods, and 
a great many of the newspaper establishments 
would do well to roll into the flames all their 
next issue of fifty or a hundred thousand copies. 
Bring forth the insufferable trash and put it 
into the fire, and let it be known in the pres- 
ence of God and angels and men that you are 
going to rid your houses of the overtoj3ping 
and underlying curse of a profligate literature. 

The printing-press is the mightiest agency 
on earth for good and for evil. The minister 
of the Gospel standing in a pulpit has a re- 
sponsible position, but I clo not think it is as 
responsible as the position of an editor or a 
publisher. At what distant point of time, at 
what far out circle of eternity, will cease the 
influence of a Henry J. Raymond, or a Horace 



THE BATTLE OF BOOKS. 



175 



Greeley, or a James Gordon Bennett? Take 
the simple statistic that our New York dailies 
now have a circulation of three hundred and 
fifty thousand per day, and add to it the fact 
that three of our weekly periodicals have an 
aggregate circulation of about one million, and 
then cipher, if you can, how far up, and how 
far down, and how far out, reach the influences 
of the American printing-press. Great God! 
what is to be the issue of all this? I believe 
the Lord intends the printing-press to be the 
chief means for the world's rescue and evangel- 
ization, and I think that the great last battle 
of the world will not be fought with swords 
or guns, but with types and presses — a puri- 
fied and Gospel literature triumphing over, 
trampling clown, and crushing out forever that 
which is depraved. The only way to fight a 
bad book is by printing a good one. The only 
way to overcome unclean newspaper literature 
is by scattering abroad that which is healthful. 
May God speed the cylinders of an honest, in- 
telligent, aggressive Christian printing-press ! 

I have to tell you this morning that I be- 
lieve that the greatest scourge that has ever 



1 76 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

come upon this nation has been that of un- 
clean journalism. It has its victims in all oc- 
cupations and departments. It has helped to 
fill insane asylums and penitentiaries and alms- 
houses and dens of shame. The bodies of this 
infection lie in the hospitals and in the graves, 
while their souls are being tossed over into a 
lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and de- 
spair. 

The London plague was nothing to it. 
That counted its victims by thousands, but 
this modern pest has already shoveled its 
millions into the charnel-house of the morally 
dead. Anthony Comstoek has done a glori- 
ous work against an infamous literature. Let 
the people all do him honor. They tried the 
other night to kill him in Newark. If they 
had slain him in his battle against a bad liter- 
ature, it would have kindled a fire of indigna- 
tion that all the waters of the Hudson and 
the East River could not have extinguished. 
That man has already literally gathered up 
whole tons of iniquitous literature and con- 
signed it to the fiarnes. But the longest rail- 
train that ever ran over the Erie or Hudson 



WHAT TO READ. 



177 



tracks was not long enough or large enough 
to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction 
which have gathered up in the bad books and 
newspapers of this land in the last twenty years. 
Now it is amidst such circumstances that I 
put this morning a question of overmastering 
importance to you and your families. What 
books and newspapers shall we read? You 
see I group them together. A newspaper is 
only a book in a swifter and more portable 
shape, and the same rules which will apply to 
book reading will apply to newspaper reading. 
What shall we read ? Shall our minds be the 
receptacle of every thing that an author has a 
mind to write ? Shall there be no distinction 
between the tree of life and the tree of death ? 
Shall we stoop down and drink out of the 
trough which the wickedness of men has filled 
with pollution and shame ? Shall we mire in 
impurity and chase fantastic will-o'-the-wisps 
across the swamps, when we might walk in 
the blooming gardens of God ? Oh, no. For 
the sake of our present and everlasting wel- 
fare, we must make an intelligent and Chris- 
tian choice. 

8* 



I7 8 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

Standing as we do chin -deep in fictitious 
literature, the first question that many of the 
young people are asking me, is: "Shall we 
read novels?" I reply, there are novels that 
are pure, good, Christian, elevating to the 
heart and ennobling to the life. But I have 
still further to say, that I believe that ninety- 
nine out of the one hundred novels in this 
day are baleful and destructive to the last de- 
gree. A pure work of fiction is history and 
poetry combined. It is a history of things 
around us with the licenses and the assumed 
names of poetry. The world can never pay 
the debt which it owes to such fictitious 
writers as Hawthorne, and Mackenzie, and 
Landor, and Hunt, and Arthur, and Marion 
Harland, and others whose names are famil- 
iar to all. The follies of high life were never 
better exposed than by Miss Edgeworth. The 
memories of the past were never more faith- 
fully embalmed than in the writings of Walter 
Scott. Cooper's novels are healthfully redo- 
lent with the breath of the sea- weed and the 
air of the American forest. Charles Kingsiey 
has smitten the morbidness of the world, and 



GOOD NOVELS. 



179 



led a great many to appreciate the poetry of 
sound health, strong muscles, and fresh air. 
Thackeray did a grand work in caricaturing 
the pretenders to gentility and high blood. 
Dickens has built his own monument in his 
books, which are an everlasting plea for the 
poor and the anathema of injustice. Now I 
say books like these, read at right times and 
read in right proportion with other books, can 
not help but be ennobling and purifying ; but, 
alas ! for the loathsome and impure literature 
that has come upon this country in the shape 
of novels, like a freshet, overflowing all the 
banks of decency and common sense. They 
are coming from some of the most celebrated 
publishing houses of the country. They are 
coming with the recommendation of some of 
our religious newspapers. They lie on your 
centre-table to curse your children, and blast 
with their infernal fires generations unborn. 
You find these books in the desk of the 
school-miss, in the trunk of the young man, in 
the steamboat cabin, and ou the table of the 
hotel reception-room. You see a light in your 
child's room late at night. You suddenly go 



180 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

in, and say, " What are you doing ?" " I am 
reading." "What are you reading?" "A 
book." You look at the book; it is a bad 
book. " Where did you get it V " I borrow- 
ed it." Alas ! there are always those abroad 
who would like to loan your son or daughter 
a bad book. Everywhere, everywhere, an un- 
clean literature ! I charge upon it the de- 
struction of ten thousand immortal souls, and 
I bid you this morning wake up to the mag- 
nitude of the theme. I shall take all the 
world's literature, good novels and bad, trav- 
els true and false, histories faithful and in- 
correct, legends beautiful and monstrous, all 
tracts, all chronicles, all epilogues, all family, 
city, State, National libraries, and pile them 
up in a pyramid of literature, and then I shall 
bring to bear upon it some grand, glorious, 
infallible, unmistakable Christian principles. 
God help me to speak with reference to the 
account I must at last render, and Grod help 
you to listen ! 

I charge you, in the first place, to stand 
aloof from all books that give false pictures 
of human life. Life is neither a tragedy nor 



THE VICTIMS. 181 



a farce. Men are not all either knaves or he- 
roes. Women are neither angels nor furies. 
And yet, if you depended upon much of the 
literature of the day, you would get the idea 
that life, instead of being something earnest, 
something practical, is a fitful and fantastic 
and extravagant thing. How poorly prepared 
are that young man and woman for the duties 
of to-day, who spent last night wading through 
brilliant passages descriptive of magnificent 
knavery and wickedness ! The man will be 
looking all day long for his heroine in the tin 
shop, by the forge, in the factory, in the count- 
ing-room, and he will not find her, and he will 
be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up 
to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be 
nerveless, inane, and a nuisance. He will be 
fit- neither for the store, nor the shop, nor the 
field. A woman who gives herself up to the 
indiscriminate reading of novels will be unfit- 
ted for the duties of wife, mother, sister, daugh- 
ter. There she is, hair disheveled, countenance 
vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling, bursting 
into tears at midnight over the fate of some 
unfortunate lover. In the day-time, when she 



182 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

ought to be busy, staring by the half-hour at 
— nothing : biting her finger-nails to the quick. 
The carpet that was plain before will be plain- 
er after having through a romance all night 
long wandered in tessellated halls of castles, 
and your industrious companion will be more 
unattractive than ever now that you have 
walked in the romance through parks with 
plumed princesses, or lounged in the arbor 
with the polished desperado. Oh, these con- 
firmed novel readers ! They are unfit for this 
life, which is a tremendous discipline. They 
know not how to go through the furnaces of 
trial where they must pass, and they are un- 
fitted for a world where every thing we gain 
we achieve by hard, long -continuing, and ex- 
haustive work. 

Again, abstain from all those books which, 
while they have some good things about them, 
have also an admixture of evil. You have 
read books that had the two elements in 
them, the good and the bad. Which stuck 
to you \ The bad ! The heart of most peo- 
ple is like a sieve which lets the small parti- 
cles of gold fall through, but keeps the great 



THE BLACK LEOPARD. 183 

cinders. Once in a while there is a mind like 
a loadstone, which, plunged amidst steel and 
brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels 
the brass. But it is generally just the oppo- 
site. If you attempt to plunge through a 
hedge of burrs to get one blackberry, you 
will get more burrs than blackberries. You 
can not afford to read a bad book, however 
good you are. You say, " The influence is in- 
significant." I tell you that the scratch of 
a pin has sometimes produced the locked-jaw. 
Alas ! if through curiosity, as many do, you 
pry into an evil book, your curiosity is as 
dangerous as that of the man who should 
take a torch into a gunpowder -mill, merely 
to see whether it really would blow up or 
not. 

Only this last week, in a menagerie in New 
York, a man put his hand through the bars 
of a black leopard's cage. The animal's hide 
looked so sleek and bright and beautiful. He 
just stroked it once. The monster seized him, 
and he drew forth a hand torn and mangled 
and bleeding. Oh, touch not evil, even with 
the faintest stroke; though it may be glossy 



1 84 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

and beautiful, touch it not, lest you pull forth 
your soul torn and bleeding under the clutch 
of the black leopard. " But," you say, " how 
can I find out whether a book is good or bad 
without reading it?" There is always some- 
thing suspicious about a bad book. I never 
knew an exception. Something suspicious in 
the index or the style of illustration. This 
venomous reptile almost always carries a 
warning rattle. 

Again, I charge you to stand off from all 
those books which corrupt the imagination and 
inflame the passions. I do not refer now to 
that kind of a book which the villain has un- 
der his coat, waiting for the school to be out, 
and then, looking both ways to see that there 
is no policeman around the block, offers the 
book to your son on his way home. I do not 
speak of that kind of literature, but that which 
evades the law and comes out in polished style, 
and with acute plot sounds the tocsin that 
rouses up all the baser passions of the soul. 
Years ago a French lady came forth as an au- 
thoress under the assumed name of George 
Sand. She smokes cigars. She wears gentle- 



SIN VARNISHED. ^5 

men's apparel. She steps off the bounds of 
decency. She writes with a style ardent, elo- 
quent, mighty in its gloom, horrible in its un- 
chastity, glowing in its verbiage, vivid in its 
portraiture, damning in its effects, transfusing 
into the libraries and homes of the world an 
evil that has not even begun to relent; and 
she has her copyists in all lands. To-day, un- 
der the nostrils of your city, there is a fetid, 
reeking, unwashed literature, enough to poison 
all the fountains of public virtue and smite 
your sons and daughters as with the wing of a 
destroying angel, and it is time that the minis- 
ters of the Gospel blew the trumpet and rallied 
the forces of righteousness, all armed to the 
teeth in this great battle against a depraved 
literature. 

Again, abstain from those books which are 
apologetic of crime. It is a sad thing that 
some of the best and most beautiful book-bind- 
ery and some of the finest rhetoric has been 
brought to make sin attractive. Vice is a hor- 
rible thing anyhow. It is born in shame, and 
it dies howling in the darkness. In this world 
it is scourged with a whip of scorpions, but 



jS6 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

afterward the thunders of God's wrath pursue 
it across a boundless desert, beating it with 
ruin and woe. When you come to paint car- 
nality, do not paint it as looking from behind 
embroidered curtains or through lattice of 
royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies 
of a city hospital. Cursed be the books that 
try to make impurity decent, and crime at- 
tractive, and hypocrisy noble ! Cursed be the 
books that swarm with libertines and despera- 
does, who make the brain of the young people 
whirl with villainy ! Ye authors who write 
them, ye publishers who print them, ye book- 
sellers who distribute them, shall be cut to 
pieces, if not by an aroused community, then 
at last by the aid of divine vengeance, which 
shall sweep to the lowest pit of perdition all 
ye murderers of souls. I tell you, though you 
may escape in this world, you will be ground 
at last under the hoof of eternal calamities, and 
you will be chained to the rock, and you will 
have the vultures of despair clawing at your 
soul, and those whom you have destroyed will 
come around to torment you, and to pour hot- 
ter coals of fury upon your head, and rejoice 



REASON DETHRONED. 187 

eternally in the outcry of your pain and the 
howl of your damnation. " God shall wound 
the hairy scalp of him that goeth on in his 
trespasses." 

The clock strikes midnight. A fair form 
bends over a romance. The eyes flash fire. 
The breath is quick and irregular. Occasion- 
ally the -color dashes to the cheek, and then 
dies out. The hands tremble as though a 
guardian spirit were trying to shake the dead- 
ly book out of the grasp. Hot tears fall. She 
laughs w T ith a shrill voice that drops dead at 
its own sound. The sweat on her brow is the 
spray dashed up from the river of death. The 
clock strikes " four," and the rosy dawn soon 
after begins to look through the lattice upon 
the pale form that looks like a detained spec- 
tre of the ni^ht. Soon in a mad-house she will 
mistake her ringlets for curling serpents, and 
thrust her white hand through the bars of the 
prison, and smite her head, rubbing it back as 
though to push the scalp from the skull, shriek- 
ing, " My brain ! my brain I" Oh, stand off 
from that. Why will you go sounding your 
way amidst the reefs and warning buoys, when 



THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 



there is such a vast ocean in which you may 
voyage, all sail set ? 

There is one other thing I shall say this 
morning before I leave you, whether you 
want to hear it or not ; that is, that I con- 
sider the lascivious pictorial literature of the 
day as most tremendous for ruin. There is 
no one who can like good pictures better than 
I do. The quickest and most condensed way 
of impressing the public mind is by picture. 
What the painter does by his brush for a few 
favorites the engraver does by his knife for 
the million. What the author accomplishes 
by fifty pages the artist does by a flash. The 
best part of a painting that costs ten thousand 
dollars you may buy for ten cents. Fine 
paintings belong to the aristocracy of art. 
Engravings belong to the democracy of art. 
You do well to gather good pictures in your 
home. Spread them before your children af- 
ter the tea-hour is past, and the evening circle 
is gathered. Throw them on the invalid's 
couch. Strew them through the rail-train to 
cheer the traveler on his journey. Tack them 
on the wall of the nursery. Gather them in 



UNCLEAN PICTURES. ^9 

albums and port-folios. Grod speed the good 
pictures on their way with ministries of knowl- 
edge and mercy. 

But what shall I say of the prostitution of 
this art to purposes of iniquity? These death- 
warrants of the soul are at every street-corner. 
They smite the vision of the young with pollu- 
tion. Many a young man buying a copy has 
bought his eternal discomfiture. There may 
be enough poison in one bad picture to poison 
one soul, and that soul may poison ten, and 
the ten fifty, and the hundreds thousands, un- 
til nothing but the measuring-line of eternity 
can tell the height and depth and ghastliness 
and horror of the great undoing. The work 
of death that the wicked author does in a 
whole book the bad engraver may clo on half 
a side of a pictorial. Under the disguise of 
pure mirth the young man buys one of these 
sheets. He unrolls it before his comrades 
amidst roars of laughter, but long after the 
paper is gone the result may perhaps be seen 
in the blasted imaginations of those who saw 
it. The Queen of Death every night holds a 
banquet, and these periodicals are the printed 



190 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

invitation to her guests. Alas ! that the fair 
brow of American art should be blotched 
with this plague - spot, and that philanthro- 
pists bothering themselves about smaller evils 
should lift up no united and vehement voice 
against this great calamity ! 

Young man ! Buy not this moral strych- 
nine for your soul ! Pick not up this nest of 
coiled adders for your pocket ! Patronize no 
news-stand that keeps them! Have your 
room bright with good engravings, but for 
these outrageous pictorials have not one wall, 
not one bureau, not one pocket. A man is no 
better than the pictures he loves to look at. 
If your eyes are not pure, your heart can not 
be. By a news-stand one can guess the char- 
acter of a man by the kind of pictorial he pur- 
chases. When the devil fails to get a man to 
read a bad book, he sometimes succeeds in get- 
ting him to look at a bad picture. When Sa- 
tan goes a-fishing, he does not care whether it 
is a long line or a short line, if he only draws 
his victim in. 

Beware of lascivious pictorials, young man ; 
in the name of Almighty God, I charge you. 



JUST ONE BOOK. I9I 

If I have this morning successfully laid 
down any principles by which you may judge 
in regard to books and newspapers, then I 
have done something of which I shall not be 
ashamed on the day which shall try every 
man's work, of what sort it is. Cherish good 
books and newspapers. Beware of the bad 
ones. One column may save your soul; one par- 
agraph may ruin it. Benjamin Franklin said 
that the reading of Cotton Mather's "Essay 
to Do Good" moulded his entire life. The 
assassin of Lord Russell declared that he was 
led into crime by reading one vicious romance. 
The consecrated John Angel James, than whom 
England never produced a better man, de- 
clared, in his old days, that he had never yet 
got over the evil effects of having for fifteen 
minutes once read a bad book. But I need 
not go so far off. I could come nearer home, 
and tell you of something that occurred in my 
college days. I could tell you of a comrade 
who was great-hearted, noble, and generous. 
He was studying for an honorable profession, 
but he had an infidel book in his trunk, and 
he said to me one day, " De Witt, would you 



192 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

like to read it?" I said, "Yes, I would." I 
took the book and read it only for a few min- 
utes. I was really startled with what I saw 
there, and I handed the book back to him, 
and said, " You had better destroy that book." 
In o, he kept it. He read it. He re-read it. 
After a while he gave up religion as a myth. 
He gave up God as a nou entity. He gave up 
the Bible as being a fable. He gave up the 
Church of Christ as a useless institution. He 
gave up good morals as being unnecessarily 
stringent. I have heard of him but twice in 
many years. The time before the last I heard 
of him he was a confirmed inebriate. The last 
time I heard of him he was coming out of an 
insane asylum — in body, mind, and soul an 
awful wreck. I believe that one infidel book 
killed him for two worlds. 

Go home to-day and look through your li- 
brary, and then, having looked through your 
library, look on the stand where you keep 
your pictorials and newspapers, and apply 
the Christian principles I have laid down this 
morning. If there is any thing in your home 
that can not stand the test, do not give it 



ANOTHER BONFIRE. 



!93 



away, for it inight spoil an immortal soul; 
do not sell it, for the money you get would 
be the price of blood; but rather kindle a 
fire on your kitchen hearth or in your back 
yard, and then drop the poison in it, and keep 
stirring the blaze until, from Preface to Ap- 
pendix, there shall not be a single paragraph 
left, and the bonfire in Brooklyn shall be as 
consuming as that one in the streets of Eph- 
esus. 

So you see I have resumed the series of 
sermons I have been preaching on Sabbath 
mornings in regard to public iniquities. I 
shall go on. Next Sabbath morning I shall 
talk to you, if God spares my life, about the 
God -defying extravagance of our American 
cities, and on the following Sabbath morning 
about the perils of an unclean life. I will 
have you understand that I have only plowed 
one furrow of a whole field, which I mean yet, 
if God helps me, to turn up. I am encour- 
aged in this series of sermons by the letters 
which I have received from all parts of this 
land, north, south, east, and west ; by the tes- 
timony of young men who say they have 

9 



I 9 4 THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 

changed their course of life; by the thanks 
of parents, who say that their families have 
been reconstructed on some of the principles 
of Christian ethics that have been laid down. 
Yes, I have been encouraged by the approval 
of my own conscience, and the assurance that 
I have in this matter been favored of God. 
Yes, I have been encouraged by the agitation 
in the enemy's camp; for when I see such a 
great scattering among the troops, I know the 
bombshell struck. So I shall go on. I know 
some of my enemies say, as Goliath said to lit- 
tle David, " Come to me, and I will give thy 
flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the 
beasts of the field." But I reply to that in 
the words of David to the Philistine, " Thou 
comest to me with sword, and spear, and 
shield : but I come to thee in the name of 
the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of 
Israel, whom thou hast defied. This day will 
the Lord deliver thee into mine hand, that all 
the earth may know that there is a God in 
Israel." 

Professor VandenhorT covered up this city 
with advertisements, " Vandenhoff versus Tal- 



THE FEROCIOUS PROFESSOR. 



195 



mage." He first demolished me in Brooklyn, 
in the Academy of Music, and two nights 
after he demolished me in Stein way Hal], 
New York. In the audience -room of our 
beautiful Academy of Music, which holds 
three thousand people, he had, on a clear 
night, a beggarly attendance of two hundred 
and fifty. That was his first demolishing. 
Then he went to New York, and in a vast 
hall that holds between two and three thou- 
sand people, had another audience of two 
hundred and fifty. This was the second time 
he demolished me. He is out of pocket some 
five or six hundred dollars, I am told. Poor 
man ! I am sorry for him. If he will come to 
me I will help pay the deficit. But he has 
shown to all this country that in our great 
cluster of cities, with more than a million pop- 
ulation, there can be got together only five 
hundred people on the side of immorality, and 
against the Church of the Son of God. Be 
encouraged, all Christian people. The broth- 
els will go down. The grog-shops will go 
down. The theatres will go down. You and 
I may not live to see the consummation of all 



196 



THE AMERICAN PLAGUE-SPOT. 



our wishes, but the cause of God is marching 
on in the world, and organized iniquity shall 
perish, and the throne of righteousness shall 
be established in all the earth. "Blessed be 
the Lord Grod of Israel, from everlasting to 
everlasting, and let the whole earth be filled 
with His glory. Amen, and Amen." 



THE PAST AND THE PRESENT. 



197 



GOD -DEFYING EXTRAVAGANCE OF 
MODERN SOCIETY. 

" Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are 
haughty, aud walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, 
walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with 
their feet : in that day the Lord will take away the bravery of 
their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and 
their round tires like the~moon, the chains, and the bracelets, 
and the mufflers, the bonuets, and the ornaments of the legs, 
and the head-bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings, the rings, 
and nose-jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the man- 
tles, and the wimples, and the Crispin g-pins, the glasses, and the 
fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils." — Isaiah iii., 16, 18-23. 

THROUGH this window of the text we 
look in upon tine voluptuousness of an 
ancient city — the description, with a very lit- 
tle variation, as appropriate to New York and 
Brooklyn as to Jerusalem and Tyre. One 
might think that Isaiah had before him the 
fashion-plates, and the head-dresses, and the 
jewel-caskets, and the dancing-schools, and the 
drawing-room parties of the present day, and 
that he foresaw Saratoga and Brighton and 



198 EXTRAVAGANCE OF MODERN SOCIETY. 

Long Branch. Through this same window of 
the text we also see the masculine extrava- 
gance and dissipation which always correspond 
with the feminine. Woman may have great- 
er varieties of apparel, but she lives a quieter 
life and therefore, may have the great varie- 
ties and luxuries of dress without impediment. 
Men would wear as much, if they knew how 
without interfering with their worldly occupa- 
tions. The rough jostling of life is inimical 
to a man's dragging a dress-trail two yards in 
length, or pending from his ear a diamond 
cluster. In the time of the text, as well as in 
all ages of the world, the two sexes were alike 
in moralities or immoralities. 

While in parlor sentimentalities it is well 
that men defer to women, and women defer to 
men, in the presence of Grod, and in the light 
of eternal responsibilities, the sexes are equal. 

Our text takes us twenty-five hundred years 
back, and sets us down in an ancient city. It 
is a bright day, and the ladies are all out. The 
procession of men and women is moving up 
and down the gay streets. It is the height of 
the fashionable season. The sensible people 



JERUSALEM FASHIONABLES. 199 

move with so much modesty that they do not 
attract our attention. But here come the 
haughty daughters of Jerusalem ! They lean 
forward ; they lean very much forward : so far 
forward as to be unnatural — teetering wob- 
ling, wriggling, flirting, or, as my text describes 
it, they " walk with stretched forth necks, walk- 
ing and mincing as they go." They have spent 
hours before the mirror ere starting from home, 
and have in most astounding style arranged 
their bonnets and their veils and their entire 
apparel, and now go through the streets, tak- 
ing more of the pavement than they are en- 
titled to, sweeping along with skirts that the 
text describes as " round tires like the moon." 
See ! that is a princess ! Look ! that is a 
Damascus sword - maker ! Look ! that is a 
Syrian merchant ! The jingling of the chains, 
and the flashing of the head-bands, and the ex- 
hibitions of universal swagger attract the at- 
tention of the prophet Isaiah, and he brings 
his camera to bear upon the scene, and takes a 
picture for all the ages. But where is that 
scene? Vanished. Where are those gay 
streets ? Vermin - covered population pass 



200 EXTRAVAGANCE OF MODERN SOCIETY. 

through them. Where are the hands, and 
the necks, and the foreheads, and the shoul- 
ders, and the feet that sported all that mag- 
nificence ? Ashes ! Ashes ! 

Taking my text as a starting-point, this 
morning I come out to talk to you about the 
God-defying extravagance of modern society. 
For the refinements and the elegances and 
adornments of life, I cast my vote. While I 
was thinking over this subject, there was hand- 
ed into my house a basket of flowers, para- 
disiacal in their beauty. White calla, with 
a green background of bergonia; heliotropes 
nestling among geraniums; sepal, corolla, 
and perianth showed the touch of God's fin- 
gers. In the snow of the camelia, in the fire- 
dye of the rose, in the sky-blue of the English 
violet, I learned that God loves adornment. 
He might have made this earth so as* to satisfy 
the gross demands of sense, but left it with- 
out adornment or attraction. Instead of the 
variegated colors of the seasons, the earth might 
have worn a dress of unchanging dull brown. 
The trees might have put forth their fruit 
without the prophesy of leaf or blossom. Ni- 



GOD AND THE BEAUTIFUL. 



agara might have let down its waters in grad- 
ual descent without thunder and winged spray. 
But no. Look out, on some summer morning, 
after a heavy night-dew, and see whether or 
not God loves jewels. Put a snow-flake un- 
der a microscope, and see whether God does 
not love exquisite architecture. He decreed 
that the breastplate of the priest in olden time 
should have a wreath of gold, and the hem of 
his garment should be worked into figures of 
pomegranate. When the world sleeps, God 
blankets it with the brilliants of the night sky, 
and when it wakes, he washes it in the bur- 
nished laver of the sunrise. 

But it is absolutely necessary that we draw 
a line between that which is the lawful use of 
beautiful adornment and that extravagance 
which is the source of so much crime, wretch- 
edness, and abomination in our day. That is 
sinful extravagance when you go into any 
thing beyond your means. That which is 
right for one may be wrong for another. 
That which is lawful expense for a queen may 
be sinful outlay for a duchess. That which 
may be economy for you with larger income 

9* 



2 o 2 EXTRA VA GANCE OF MODERN SO CIE TV. 

may be squandering for me with smaller in- 
come. But when men and women cross over 
the line which separates between what they 
can pay for, and still keep a sufficiency to meet 
moral obligation on the one hand, and, on 
the other hand, that extravagance which one's 
means can not compass, they have passed from 
the innocent into the culpable. Across that 
line have gone " a multitude that no man can 
number." 

We judge of what we ought to have by what 
other people have. If they have a sumptuous 
table, and fine residence, and gay turn-out, and 
exquisite apparel, and brilliant surroundings, 
we must have them irrespective of our caj)acity 
to stand the expense. We throw ourselves 
down in despair because other people have a 
seal-skin coat, and we have an ordinary one; 
because others have diamonds, and we have 
garnets; because others have Axminster, and 
we have Brussels; because others have lam- 
brequins, and we have plain curtains. What 
others have we mean to have anyhow. So 
there are families hardly able to pay their rent, 
and in debt to every merchant in the neigh- 



FINANCIAL NOMADS. 203 

borhoocl, who sport apparel inapt for their cir- 
cumstances, and run so near the shore that the 
first misfortune in business, or the first be- 
siegement of sickness tosses them into pauper- 
ism. There are thousands of families moving 
from neighborhood to neighborhood, staying 
long; enough in each one to exhaust all their 
capacity to get trusted. They move away be- 
cause the druggists will give them no more 
medicine, and the butchers will afford them no 
more meat, and the bakers will give them no 
more bread, and the grocers will furnish them 
with no more sugar until they pay up. Then 
they suddenly find out that the neighborhood 
is unhealthy, and they hire a cartman, whom 
they never pay, to take them to a part of the 
city where all the druggists and butchers and 
bakers and grocers will be glad to see them 
come in, and sending to them the best rounds 
of beef, and the best coffee, and the best of 
every thing, until the slight suspicion comes 
into their brain that all the pay they will ever 
get from their customer is the honor of his 
society ! There are about five thousand such 
thieves in Brooklyn. You see I call it by a 



204 EXTRAVAGANCE OF MODERN SOCIETY. 

plain name, because when a man buys a thing 
that he does not expect to pay for he is a thief. 
There are circumstances where men can not 
meet their obligations. It is as honest for 
some men to fail as it is for other men to suc- 
ceed. They do their best, and through the 
misfortunes of life they are thrown, and they 
can not pay their debts. That is one thing ; 
but when you go and purchase an article for 
which you know there is no probability of 
your ever making recompense, you are a vil- 
lain ! Why do you not save the time of the 
merchant and the expense of an accountant for 
him ? Why do you not go down some day to 
his store, and, when no one is looking, shoulder 
the ham or the spare-rib, and in modest silence 
take them along with you? That would be 
a lesser crime ; for now you get not only the 
merchant's goods, but you get his time, and 
you rouse up his expectations. If you must 
steal, steal so it will be the least possible 
damage to the trader. John RandoljDh arose 
in the American Senate, and, stretching him- 
self up to full height, cried out, with a shrill 
voice, " Mr. Chairman, I have found the phi- 



INVITATION TO WALK. 



205 



losopher's- stone that turns every thing into 
gold : Pay as you go." 

My friends, society has to be reconstructed 
on this subject. You have no right to ride in 
a carriage when you owe the wheelwright who 
furnished the landau, and the horse-dealer who 
provided the blooded span, and the harness- 
maker who caparisoned the gay steeds, and the 
livery-man who furnished the stabling, and 
the driver who sits with rosetted hat on your 
coach -box. I am glad to see you ride. The 
finer your horses and the better your carriage 
the better it pleases me. But if you are in 
debt for the equipage, and hopelessly in debt, 
get down and walk like the rest of us ! It is 
well to understand that it is not the absolute 
necessities that we find it so hard to meet, but 
the fictitious wants. God promises us shelter, 
but not a palace ; and raiment, but not chin- 
chilla; and food, but not canvas-back duck. 
As long as we have enough to meet the posi- 
tive necessities of life, we ought to be content 
until we can afford the superfluities. As soon 
as you see a man deliberately consent that his 
outgo shall exceed his income, you may know 



2 o 6 EXTRA VA GANCE OF MODERN SO CIE TV. 

he has started on the broad road to bank- 
ruptcy and moral ruin. 

This wholesale extravagance accounts for a 
great deal of depression in national finances. 
Aggregates are made up of units, and so long 
as one -half of the people of this country are 
in debt to the other half, you can not have a 
healthy financial condition. The national re- 
sources are drawn off, not only for useless ex- 
travagances, but for those that are positively 
pernicious. The theatres of New York cost 
that city every year two millions of dollars. 
We spend in this country ninety-five millions 
of dollars every year for cigars and tobacco. 
In the United States we expend annually one 
thousand four hundred and eighty-three mill- 
ions of dollars for rum. Now, take those facts, 
and is it strange that our national finances are 
craziecl ? If you have an exportation of bread- 
stuffs four times what you have now, and an 
importation of gold four times what you have 
now, there would be no permanent prosjDerity 
in this country until people quit their sinful 
lavishment, and learn honest economy. You 
charge it upon Salmon P. Chase, or Bout well, 



THE STORE UNDER EIRE. 



207 



or Secretary Kichardson. I charge it upon 
you, the men and women who are living be- 
yond your means. 

This wide-spread extravagance also accounts 
for much of the crime. It is the source of 
many abscondings, bankruptcies, defalcations, 
and knaveries. The store on Broadway and 
the office on Wall Street are swamped by the 
residence on Madison Square. The husband 
and father has his craft capsized because he 
carries too much sail of point-lace and Antuilly 
guipure. That is what destroyed Ketcham, 
and Swartwout, and ten thousand men not so 
famous. That is what springs the leak in the 
merchant's money -till, and pulls down your 
trust companies, and cracks the pistols of your 
suicides, and halts this nation on its high ca- 
reer of prosperity. I arraign this monster of 
extravagance in the sight of all the people, and 
ask you to pelt it with your scorn and de- 
nounce it with your anathema. 

This wide-spread extravagance also accounts 
for much of the pauperism in the country. 
Who are the individuals and the families who 
are thrown on your charity ? Who has sinned 



2o8 EXTRAVAGANCE OF MODERN SOCIETY. 

against them so that they suffer ? It is often 
the case that their parents, or their grand- 
parents, had all luxuries, lived every thing up, 
more than lived every thing up, and then died, 
leaving their families in want. The grand- 
parents of these beggars supped on Burgundy 
and woodcock. There are a great many fam- 
ilies who have every luxury in life, yet expend 
every dollar that comes in, and perhaps a few 
dollars more, not even taking the common 
Christian prudence of having their lives in- 
sured. While they live all is well, but when 
they die their children are pitched into the 
street. I tell you a man has no right to die 
under such circumstances. His death is a 
grand larceny. If a man has been industri- 
ous and economical, and has not a farthing 
to leave his children as he goes away from 
them, he has a right to put them in the hands 
of the Father of the fatherless and know they 
will be cared for ; but if you, with every com- 
fort in life, are lavish and improvident, and 
then depart this life leaving your children to 
be hurled into pauperism, you deserve to have 
your bones sold to the medical museum for 



THE •BLESSING OF INSURANCE. 209 

anatomical specimens, the proceeds to furnish 
your children bread. I know the subject cuts 
close. I expected that some of you in high 
dudgeon would get up and go out. You stand 
it pretty well. Some of you are making a 
great swosh in life, and after a while will die, 
leaving your families beggars, and you will 
expect us ministers of the Gospel to come and 
stand by your coffin, and lie about your ex- 
cellences ; but we will not do it. If you send 
for me, I will tell you what my text will be : 
" He that provideth not for his own, and espe- 
cially for those of his own household, is worse 
than an infidel." 

In this clay, God has mercifully allowed 
those of us who have limited income to make 
provision for our families, through the great 
life-insurance companies all over the land. 
By some self-denial on our part, we can make 
this provision for those whom we shall leave 
behind us. Is there any thing so helpless as 
a woman whose husband has just died, when, 
with her children at her back, she goes out in 
this day to fight for bread ? Shall she become 
a menial servant in some one else's household % 



210 EXTRAVAGANCE OF MODERN SOCIETY. 

No ; not the one that has been lying on your 
arm all these years, and filling the household 
with joy and light. Shall she sew for a living ? 
God knows that they get but six cents and 
eight cents for making one garment. Ah no ! 
you had better have your coffin made large 
enough to take them all with you into that 
land where they never freeze nor starve. How 
a man with no surplus of estate, but still 
enough money to pay the premium on a life- 
insurance policy, can refuse to do it, and then 
look his children in the face, and say his 
prayers at night on going to bed, expecting 
them to be answered, is a mystery to me that 
I have never yet been able to fathom. 

This extravagance is becoming more and 
more wide- spread. A statistician has estima- 
ted that there are in New York and Brooklyn 
four thousand five hundred women who ex- 
pend annually two thousand dollars each in 
dress. It is no rare thing, when the wedding 
march sounds, to see dragging through the 
aisle a bridal dress that has cost its thousand 
or fifteen hundred dollars. Things have come 
to such a pass that, when we cry over sin, we 



WEDDING PRESENTS. 



wipe the tears away with a hundred-and-fifty- 
dollar pocket-handkerchief. The tendency to 
extravagance was illustrated wonderfully when 
the late James Fisk, Jun., sent the bridal pres- 
ents to the home of William M. Tweed, a gen- 
tleman now occupying apartments at govern- 
ment expense. Fisk sent an iceberg of frosted 
silver, polar bears of silver lying down on the 
handles, polar bears of silver walking over the 
gold spoons. There were in the house that 
day forty silver sets of imperial magnificence. 
There was a diamond set that cost forty -five 
thousand dollars. There was one dress that 
had in it thirty-seven yards of silk, with three 
hundred and eighty-two bows. Hundreds of 
thousands of dollars expended on that scene. 
The reason we have not a multitude of scenes 
as extravagant is because we have not so 
much money. 

This wicked extravagance shows itself no 
more forcibly than on the funeral day. No 
one else seems willing to speak of it, so I shall 
speak of it. There has been many a man who 
has died solvent, but has been insolvent be- 
fore he got under the ground. One would 



2 1 2 EXTRA VA GANCE OF MODERN SOCIE TV. 

think that the two debts most sacred would 
be debts to the physician and the undertaker, 
since they are the last two debts contracted; 
and yet those two professions are swindled 
more frequently than any other. In the agi- 
tation and excitement the friends come, and 
they want extraordinary attention, and they 
want extraordinary expenditure, and then, 
when the sad scene is past, neglect to make 
compensation. What are those two profes- 
sions to do under such circumstances? If a 
merchant sells goods, and they are not paid 
for, I understand he can reclaim the goods; 
but if a man departs this life, and, through 
his friends, indebtedness is contracted that is 
not met, there seems to be no relief, for the 
patient has gone off with the doctor's pills 
and the undertaker's white slippers. Green- 
wood and Laurel Hill and Mount Auburn 
hold to-day thousands of such swindlers. A 
man dies in our neighboring city of New York. 
He has lived a fictitious life, moved amidst 
splendor, and dies leaving his family not a dol- 
lar ; but they, poor things ! must keep up the 
same magnificence, and so they resolve upon a 



GREA T FUNERALS. 



213 



great funeral. The obsequies shall be splen- 
did ! I give you no imaginary case. I give 
you the funeral of a man in up-town New York 
life, the facts authenticated, and in my pocket. 
The undertaker was not to blame; he only 
sold them what they asked for. The only 
blame was for those who bought when they 
knew they could not pay. 



Casliet, covered with Lyons velvet, silver mouldings 

Heavy plated handles 60 

Solid silver plate, engraved in Roman letters 75 

Ten linen scarfs 150 

Floral decorations 225 

Music and quartette choir at the house 40 

Twenty carriages, walking to the cemetery 140 

Then fifteen other important expenditures, amounting to 336 

All the expenditures, added up, being , $1876 

for getting one poor mortal to his last home ! 
Perhaps it would have been all well if they 
had been able to meet the expenditure; but 
when it was known they could not, it was a 
villainy. There are families that you know 
who, in the effort to meet the ridiculous, out- 
rageous, and wicked customs of society in re- 
gard to obsequies, have actually reduced them- 
selves to penury. They put their last dollar 



214 



EXTRAVAGANCE OF MODERN SOCIETY. 



in the ground. They wanted bread, and you 
gave them a stone. 

There is in England what jfchey call a fu- 
neral reform. It is high time we had such a 
reform society in our own country. 

This wide - spread extravagance accounts, 
also, for the poverty of religious institutions. 
Men pay so much for show they have nothing 
for God and religion. We pay in this country 
twenty -two millions of dollars for the great 
benevolent societies; but what are the twen- 
ty-two millions of dollars compared with the 
ninety-five millions for cigars and tobacco, and 
the one thousand four hundred and eighty- 
three millions for drink? How do you like 
the comparison ? 

My friends, let us set ourselves in battle ar- 
ray against this God -defying extravagance. 
Buy not those things which are frivolous, when 
you may after a while be in lack of the neces- 
sities. Buy not books you will never read, 
nor pictures you will never study. Put not a 
whole month's wages into one trinket. Keej3 
your credit good by seldom or never asking 
for any. Pay. Starve not a whole year so as 



WAR PROCLAIMED. 



215 



to be able to afford one Belshazzar's carnival. 
Do not buy a coat of many colors, and then in 
six months be out at the elbows. Do not pay 
so much for a muffler for the neck, and be 
almost barefooted. Flourish not, as some I 
know of, in elegant hotels with drawing-room 
apartments, and then vanish in the night, not 
even leaving your compliments for the land- 
lord. 

In the great day of fire, w T e will have to give 
an account not only for how we made our 
money but for how we spent it. Ou this cold 
day, when so many are suffering, and there is 
want before us and want behind us and want 
on either side of us, let us quit our waste. 
Men and women of God, I call upon you to set 
a Christian example. Eemember that soon 
you will have to leave your wardrobe and equi- 
page. I do not want you to feel on that day 
like the dying actress, who ordered up her 
casket of jewels, and then with her pale, dying 
hand rolled them over, and said, "Alas ! that I 
must give you up so soon." In that day, bet- 
ter have one treasure in heaven, just one, than 
to have had the bridal trousseau of a Queen 



2 1 6 EXTRA VA GANCE OF MODERN SO CIE TV. 

Maria Louisa, or to have sat with Caligula at a 
banquet which cost four hundred thousand dol- 
lars, or to have been carried out in a pageant, 
with senators and princes for pall -bearers. 
They who consecrate to Grod their time, their 
talents, and their all, shall be held in everlast- 
ing remembrance, while the name of the wick- 
ed shall rot. 



STRANGE CONTRADICTIONS. 



217 



THE SHEAKS OF DELILAH. 

"And she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off 
the seven locks of his head ; and she began to afflict him, and 
his strength went from him." — Judges xvi. ; 19. 

IT would take a skillful photographist to 
picture Samson as he really was. The most 
facile words are not supple enough to describe 
him. He was a giant, and a child; the con- 
queror, and the defeated ; able to snap a lion's 
jaw, and yet captured by the sigh of a maid- 
en. He was ruler, and slave; a commingling 
of virtues and vices, the sublime and the ridic- 
ulous; sharp enough to make a good riddle, 
and yet weak enough to be caught in the most 
superficial stratagem ; honest enough to settle 
his debt, and yet outrageously robbing some- 
body else to get the material to pay it; a 
miracle, and a scoffing ; a crowning glory, and 
a burning shame. 

There he stands, looming up above other 
men, a mountain of flesh ; his arms bunched 
with muscle that can lift the gate of a city ; 

10 



2i8 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH. 

taking an attitude defiant of armed men and 
wild beasts. His hair had never been cut, and 
it rolled clown in seven great plaits over his 
shoulders, adding to his fierceness and terror. 
The Philistines want to conquer him, and 
therefore they must find out where the secret 
of his strength lays. There is a woman liv- 
ing in the valley of Sorek by the name of 
Delilah. They appoint her the agent in the 
case. The Philistines are secreted in the. 
same building, and then Delilah goes to work 
and coaxes Samson to tell what is the secret 
of his strength. "Well," he says, "if you 
should take seven green withes, such as they 
fasten wild beasts with, and put them around 
me, I should be .perfectly powerless." So 
she binds him with the seven green withes. 
Then she claps her hands, and says, "They 
come — the Philistines !" and he walks out as 
though there were no impediment. She coax- 
es him again, and says, " Now tell me the se- 
cret of this great strength ;" and he replies, " If 
you should take some ropes that have never 
been used, and tie me with them, I should be 
just like other men." She ties him with the 



ORIENTAL HAIR-CUTTING. 219 

ropes, daps her hands, and shouts, " They come 
— the Philistines !" He walks out as easy as 
he did before — not a single obstruction. She 
coaxes him again, and he says, " Now, if you 
should take these seven long plaits of hair, 
and by this house -loom weave them into a 
web, I could not get away." So the house- 
loom is rolled up, and the shuttle flies back- 
ward and forward, and the long plaits of hair 
are woven into a web. Then she claps her 
hands, and says, " They come — the Philistines!" 
He walks out as easily as he did before, drag- 
ging a part of the loom with him. But after 
a while she persuades him to tell the truth. 
He says, " If you should take a razor, or shears, 
and cut off this long hair, I should be power- 
less, and in the hands of my enemies." Sam- 
son sleeps, and, that she may not wake him up 
during the process of shearing, help is called in. 
You know that the barbers of the East have 
such a skillful way of manipulating the head, 
to this very day, that, instead of waking up a 
sleeping man, they will put a man, wide awake, 
sound asleep. I hear the blades of the shears 
grinding against each other, and I see the long 



THE SHEARS OF DELILAH 



locks falling off. The shears, or razor, accom- 
plishes what green withes and new ropes and 
house-loom could not do. Suddenly she claps 
her hands, and says, " The Philistines be upon 
thee, Samson !" He rouses up with a struggle, 
but his strength is all gone ! He is in the hands 
of his enemies ! I hear the groan of the giant 
as they take his eyes out, and then I see him 
staggering on in his blindness, feeling his way 
as he goes on toward Gaza. The prison-door 
is opened, and the giant is thrust in. He sits 
down and puts his hands on the mill -crank, 
which, with exhausting horizontal motion, goes 
clay after day, week after week, month after 
month — work, work, work ! The consternation 
of the world in captivity, his locks shorn, his 
eyes punctured, grinding corn in Gaza ! 

Alas ! for those fatal shears. They did the 
work, and they have kept on doing the work. 
They have not yet finished their mission. 
Those shears are busy to-day cutting off not 
only the locks of Samson, but also of Delilah. 

It seems to me that it is high time that pul- 
pit and platform and printing-press speak out 
against the impurities of modern society. Fas- 



VARNISHING SIN 



ticliousness and Prudery say, "Better not speak; 
you will rouse up adverse criticism; you will 
make worse what you want to make better; 
better deal in glittering generalities ; the sub- 
ject is too delicate for polite ears." But there 
comes a voice from Heaven overpowering the 
mincing sentimentalities of the day, saying, 
" Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a 
trumpet, and show my people their transgres- 
sions, and the house of Jacob their sins." So 
that, turning away from the advice of men, I 
take counsel of God, and this day arraign, ex- 
pose, and denounce the impurities of modern 
society. 

The trouble is that when people write or 
speak upon this theme they are apt to cover it 
up with the graces of belles-lettres, so that the 
crime is made attractive instead of repulsive. 
Lord Byron in Chilcle Harold adorns this crime 
until it smiles like a May-queen. Michelet, 
the great French writer, covers it up with pas- 
sionate rhetoric, until it glows like the rising 
sun. Before I get through, you will find that 
I am not making that mistake, for instead of 
making this crime, so prevalent in modern so- 



222 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH 

ciety, attractive, I shall make it as loathsome 
as a sinall-pox hospital. 

There are to-day influences abroad which, if 
unresisted by the pulpit and the printing-press, 
will turn Xew York and Brooklyn into Sodom 
and Gomorrah, fit only for the storm of fire 
and brimstone that whelmed the cities of the 
plain. You who are seated in your Christian 
homes, compassed by moral and religious re- 
straints, do not realize the gulf of iniquity that 
bounds you on the north and the south and the 
east and the west; but I shall this clay open 
the door of ghastliness and horror, and compel 
you to see and compel you to listen until, God 
helping, you shall be startled and aroused, 
throwing out one arm for help and the other 
arm for battle. While I sj^eak, there are tens 
of thousands of men and women going over 
the awful plunge of an impure life; and while 
I cry to God for mercy upon their souls, I call 
upon you to marshal in the defense of your 
homes, your church, and your nation. 

There is a banqueting -hall that you have 
never heard described. You know all about 
the feast of Ahasuerus, where a thousand lords 



CARNIVAL OF DEVILS. 



223 



sat. You know all about Belshazzar's carousal, 
where the blood of the murdered king spirted 
into the faces of the banqueters. You may 
know of the scene of riot and wassail when 
there was set before Esopus one dish of food 
that cost four hundred thousand dollars. But 
I speak to-day of a different banqueting-hall. 
Its roof is fretted with fire. Its floor is tes- 
sellated with fire. Its chalices are chased with 
fire. Its song is a sons: of fire. Its walls are 
buttresses of fire. It is the banqueting-hall 
of a libertine's and adulteress's perdition. Sol- 
omon refers to it when he says, " Her guests 
are in the depths of hell." 

I shall this morning explain to you how 
so often the shears of destruction come upon 
the locks of Samson and Delilah. Beginning; 
on the lower round, I have to tell you that 
pauperism is the cause of a great deal of the 
uncleanness. There are many people in our 
midst who have to choose between the alms- 
house and crime. There are women who can 
get neither sewing nor any other kind of 
work. What are they to do? What shall 
become of them? Thousands and tens of 



224 



THE SHEARS OF DELILAH 



thousands of them have been fighting the 
battle for bread five, ten, fifteen years. They 
sold the piano, they sold the pictures, they 
sold the library, they sold the carpet, they 
sold the chairs, they sold the bed, they sold 
the wardrobe ; there is one thing more to sell, 
and that is their immortal nature. At that 
crisis infamous solicitation meets them, and 
they go down. With one awful fling they 
throw away their needle and their soul. 

Besides this, there are in this cluster of cit 
ies — and when I say in this sermon this clus 
ter of cities, I mean New York, Jersey City 
and Brooklyn — there are in this cluster of cit 
ies six hundred thousand people who are jam 
med together in tenement -houses, with no op 
portunity for seclusion or decency, and do you 
wonder that so many of them forget the cov- 
enant of their God ? Forty and fifty families 
sometimes, literally forty and fifty families, 
crowded together under one roof. One hun- 
dred and seventy thousand families living in 
twenty-seven thousand houses — this tenement- 
house outrage more terrible than any thing to 
be found in all Christendom, putting out of 



HOW SHE PERISHED. 



225 



sight almost the London stories of St. Giles 
and Whitechapel. These tenement - houses 
are the hopper for the mill that is grinding 
up the bodies and the souls of men, women, 
and little children. Some time ago a girl of 
fourteen years came into one of the reform 
schools in New York. The teacher of the 
school said, " Poor girl, did you forget your 
mother, and that it was a sin?" She looked 
up and said, " No, I didn't forget my mother. 
My mother has no clothes, and I have no 
shoes, and this dress is almost worn out, and 
the winter's coming on. I know what it is 
to make money, sir. Why, I have taken care 
of myself since I was ten years of age. You 
think it was a sin, do you ?" And the tears 
rolled down her face, and she did not try to 
wipe them away. " It was a sin, but I didn't 
ask you to forgive me. Men can't forgive, 
but God can. I know, sir, what men are. 
The rich do wickedness, but nothing is said 
about them. But I am poor, and God knows 
that many a time I have gone hungry all day 
because I didn't dare to spend a penny or two 
— all I had left. Oh, sir, I sometimes wish 
10* 



22 6 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH. 

that I could die. I wonder why God don't 
kill me." Alas ! for the poor things. Do you 
wonder that they go down? Moral: do all 
you can for the poor. Keep them from being 
crowded off into sin. Snuff not up the idea 
in derision that any body should surrender to 
such temptations. There are sitting before 
me to-day five hundred people in furs and di- 
amonds who, under the same pressure, would 
have gone overboard ! If, oh man, oh woman, 
you have not done as badly as they, it is be- 
cause you have not been as much tempted. 
If Delilah has not shorn your locks, it is be- 
cause she has not had the same chance at you. 
Again I remark, that the corrupt literature 
of this day is the cause of much uncleanness. 
I referred to this in a former sermon, but I re- 
served to this day some facts which will ap- 
pall you. You know that there are hundreds 
of thousands of sheets in the shape of impure 
novelette literature going abroad, every plot 
of those novelettes turning on libertinism and 
full of salacious suggestion. Much of the 
printing-press of the country reeks with pol- 
lution. The child that comes to fifteen or six- 



BROOKLYN'S SHAME. 



227 



teen years of age now in these cities has read 
more bad books and seen more bad pictures 
than your grandmother and grandfather read 
or saw up to the time they put on spectacles. 
There was one citizen in Brooklyn who made 
four hundred thousand dollars by publishing 
obscene books, and when he was seized by 
Governmental authority there was found thir- 
ty thousand dollars' worth of stock on hand. 
That man is dead, and gone to perdition ; but 
his wife has his money, and now moves, I am 
told, in respectable circles. It must be told 
that of the four men who originally publish- 
ed all the obscene books and newspapers in 
this country, three of them lived in Brooklyn. 
Two of them are dead, thank God ! I wish 
they all were. 

In the city of New York there was one 
house under the control of a man who was a 
member of the church, and that house did 
nothing but make bad books, circulars, and 
pictures. When the authorities seized upon 
the place, they found whole tons of stereotyped 
plates for doing nothing but the printing of 
bad circulars and books. That man was a 



22 8 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH. 

member of the church. He was awfully pious ! 
He had on the mantel in his factory a rack 
containing religious tracts, with the inscription 
on the outside, " Take one." I do not know 
whether to this day he has been excommuni- 
cated, for other churches have not the moral 
courage which the Session of this church had 
when, last spring, finding a bad man in our 
membership, they unanimously ejected him, 
all the sixteen men of the Session having the 
moral daring to vote "Ay." God speed the 
day when it shall be impossible for a man to 
practice iniquity and yet keep his place in the 
membership of a Christian church ! 

But to go back to my theme. There was one 
man in our neighboring city who published 
and sold to one dealer one hundred and twen- 
ty-five thousand obscene books. When the 
authorities came upon him there were found 
forty thousand copies yet unsold. Binding 
these bad books in one of the factories were 
forty young women. One hundred and ninety 
thousand obscene photographs and engravings 
have been arrested in their flight of death. 
Twenty tons of iniquitous literature have been 



SLAUGHTER OF BOARDING-SCHOOLS. 



229 



thrown into the flames. But the tide of evil 
goes on. How many are engaged in it ? Some 
with the title of M. D. at the end of their 
names, implying themselves public benefactors 
and friends of humanity. 

These people despoil the souls of men and 
women, if not in one way, then in another. 
They send their circulars and handbills far 
away. They put their infamous pictures on 
the back of playing-cards. They cut them into 
watch-cases. The venders in this business have 
the names of all the boarding-schools in the 
country, male and female, and not only the 
names of all the schools, but the names of all 
the students. The catalogues have been found 
in possession of these vultures, and their cir- 
culars and their pictures and their books go 
through the Post-office Department to all the 
young. The base circulars and advertisements 
are thrown into your door- way. They are fling- 
ing across this land the plagues of Egypt, the 
frogs and the boils and the murrain and the lice, 
turning the rivers into blood and the heavens 
into darkness. You, the father and mother, 
do not know it ; but your children come to fif 



23° 



THE SHEARS OF DELILAH. 



teen or sixteen years of age have seen the pic- 
tures and have read the books. There is not 
a school, not a shop, not a factory, not a home 
but has been assaulted in some way by this 
literature. So far from exaggerating the evil, 
if you could to-day understand the magnitude 
of it, it seems to me you would rise up from 
your seats and shriek out with horror. These 
villains — be they authors, engravers, publish- 
ers, or venders — ought to be seized of the law, 
summarily tried, sentenced to the full extent 
of the statute, and on swiftest express train 
hurried up to Sing Sing Penitentiary ; and no 
man found in gubernatorial or presidential 
chair should ever dare to jmrdon one of them. 
This evil does not need the snail -pace of the 
law ; it wants the quick spring of human and 
divine indignation. 

Again : Infidelity and skepticism are the 
two blades of a shears wmich clip off much 
of the purity of the land. I do not mean to 
say that all skeptics are themselves unclean, 
but I do say that they open one of the widest 
doors to this iniquity. Purity and the sanc- 
tity of the marriage relation have only one 



THE BROOD OF DEATH. 231 

foundation, and that is this book which King 
James got fifty ■ four ministers to translate, 
and which Robert Barker first printed in En- 
glish. You throw away your Bible, and you 
throw away chastity and the marriage relation. 
A man that fights against that book fights 
in behalf of licentiousness. Infidelity is the 
mother of Fourierism, Communism, Mormon- 
ism, Socialism, Free-loveism, and much of what 
is falsely called "Woman's Rights." I abhor 
the whole herd of them. There are many 
rights that belong to woman which I hope 
in some day will be accorded to her ; but I 
tell you, my Christian brethren, this whole 
subject of "Woman's Rights" in our day is 
so mixed up with infidelity and lust that you 
had better, if you are decent people, come off 
that platform, and let the maniacs have it all 
to themselves. We propose to build a Chris- 
tian platform, on which we shall discuss the 
rights of both sexes, as God in his Word lays 
down those rights. I charge upon Free-love- 
ism that it has blighted innumerable homes, 
and that it has sent innumerable souls to ruin. 
Free-loveism is bestial; it is worse — it is in- 



23 2 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH. 

fernal. It has furnished this land with about 
five hundred divorces annually. In one coun- 
ty in the State of Indiana it furnished elev- 
en divorces in one clay before dinner. It has 
roused up elopements north, south, east, and 
west. You can hardly take up a paper but 
you read of an elopement. 

As far as I can understand the doctrine of 
Free-loveism, it is this : that every man ought 
to have somebody else's wife, and every wife 
somebody else's husband ! They do not like 
our Christian organization of society, and I 
wish they would all elope, the wretches of 
one sex taking the wretches of the other, and 
start to-morrow morning for the great Sahara 
Desert, until the simoon shall sweep seven feet 
of sand over all of them, and not one passing 
caravan for the next five hundred years bring 
back one miserable bone of their carcasses. 
Free-loveism ! It is the double-distilled extract 
of nux vomica, ratsbane, and adder's -tongue. 
Free-loveism has raised in this city of Brook- 
lyn a stench that has gone all over the world, 
and I think they will have to shut up the win- 
dows and gates of heaven to keep out the in- 



THE UNCLEAN INSTITUTION 233 

sufferable roal-oclor. Never, until society goes 
back to the old Bible, and hears its eulogy of 
purity and its anathema of uncleanness, never 
until then will the fatal shears be unriveted. 

Again: The American theatre is the cause of 
much impurity. It has debauched the nation. 
The play-actors and the play-actresses for the 
most part are licentious people. The excep- 
tions to it are as rare as " four-leafed clovers." 
My conscience smites me when I think of the 
sermons I have been preaching about the thea- 
tre, in the fact that I have not half stated the 
uncleanness and the rottenness of that institu- 
tion. Take the most denunciatory things I have 
said, and add to them fifty per cent, of Chris- 
tian indignation, and then you will not come 
up to the truth. Most houses have a side-cloor 
and a back-door, as well as a front-door. I tell 
you the front -door of the house of shame in 
this clay is the theatre. When you go there, 
in nine cases out of ten you put yourselves 
under lascivious influences, you put your feet 
in the footsteps of those who have gone down 
the whole stairs of iniquity. You may be 
pure now ; but if you do not go just as far as 



234 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH. 

they have gone, it will not be because you are 
more prudent, but because the grace of God 
miraculously saves yon. Oh, beware of this 
institution, against which the Church of God 
and the best people in society are set in battle 
array ! I hereby offer a reward of five hundred 
dollars to any body who will during this week 
send me the- name of any one who is eminent 
for piety, and at the same time advocates and. 
frequents the American theatre as it now is. 
Gentlemen of the press will please to get that 
just right. 

An institution which has for its support 
play-actors, the majority of whom are unclean, 
the plays and literature of which are unclean, 
and that is favored and honored by all the 
unclean of earth — an institution like that must 
be a door to uncleanness. Take your head 
out of the lap of that infamous Delilah ; she 
will cut your locks off. 

Again: The evil solicitation of the street 
shears off much of the moral strength. The 
uncleanness under the gas-light of the street- 
lamp may disgust you, but it is an appalling 
fact that night by night there are thousands 



OLD SKETCH OF BOWERY. 



235 



going clown under the process. Solomon a 
good many years ago gave a picture of Broad- 
way and the Bowery after nine o'clock at 
night : " She sitteth at the door of her house, 
on a seat in the high places of the city, to call 
passengers who go right on their ways : whoso 
is simple, let him turn in hither; and as for 
him that wanteth understanding, she saith to 
him, Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten 
in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not 
that the dead are there." 

Twenty - five hundred of those lost souls 
trudging the streets in this cluster of cities 
night by night on their errand of death ! Hov- 
ering around hotels and depots ! Flaunting 
their insignia of iniquity ! Laughing the fiend's 
laugh ! Rolling up and down in surges of 
death ! Twenty - live hundred taking down 
their victims ! New York pre-eminent above 
all the cities in this land for this infamy ! One 
of the superintendents of police declared that 
there were enough houses of iniquity in New 
York to make a line three miles long, and that 
they would crowd Broadway from the Battery 
to Houston Street, in solid blocks, on each side; 



236 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH. 

some of theni having all the repulsions of 
Arch Block and of the sailors' boarding-house, 
but some having all the glitter of the Fifth 
Avenue parlor. Upholstery outflaming the 
setting sun; mirrors winged with cherubim; 
fountains trickling mid -room into aquariums 
afloat with bright fins ; pictures that rival the 
Louvre and Luxembourg; carpets embracing 
the feet with their luxuriance ; Chickering 
grand pouring out upon the night-air snatches 
of opera to charm passers-by. But the dead 
are there; and if the enchanter's wand could 
be only turned backward, or inverted, the up- 
holstery would turn into a shroud, and the 
bright fountain into waters ropy and scummed, 
and the chandelier into the fretted roof of a 
sepulchre, and the song into a dirge, and the 
gay denizens of the place into the wan faces 
of the damned. 

These places are all the time being filled 
up by the tides that are coming in from the 
villages and the cities around us — ay, from 
the beautiful houses of this city, pouring in 
and falling down into an aggregation of mis- 
ery and suffering inexpressible. Nine-tenths 



THE VERDANT BOY 



237 



of the inmates are the victims of man's profli- 
gacy, and are now taking their vengeance on 
society : reaching np from the depths of their 
souls' suicide, clutching for immortal souls, 
dragging them down to their abysm ; and 
every time they clutch with skeleton fingers, 
hearts are breakiug, and homes are falling, and 
desolations are accumulating. Do you know 
there are men who do nothing else but try to 
draw souls into this whirlpool ? 

The first time I ever saw the city — it was the 
city of Philadelphia — I was a mere lad. I stop- 
ped at a hotel, and I remember in the even-tide 
one of these men plied me with his infernal art. 
He saw I was green. He wanted to show me 
the sights of the town. He painted the path 
of sin until it looked like emerald ; but I was 
afraid of him. I shoved back from the basi- 
lisk — I made up my mind he was a basilisk. 
I remember how he wheeled his chair round 
in front of me, and, with a concentred and dia- 
bolical effort, attempted to destroy my soul; 
but there were good angels in the air that 
night. It was no good resolution on my part, 
but it was the all-encompassing grace of a good 



238 THE SHEARS OF DELILAH 

God that delivered me. Beware ! beware ! oh, 
young man. "There is a way that seerneth 
right unto a man, but the end thereof is death." 

If all the victims of this temptation, in all 
lands and ages, could be gathered together, 
they would make a host vaster than that which 
Xerxes led across the Hellesj)ont, than that 
which Napoleon marshaled at Austerlitz, than 
that which Wellington led into Waterloo ; and 
if they could be stretched out in single file 
across this continent, I think the van -guard 
of the host would stand on the beach of the 
Pacific, while yet the rear-guard stood on the 
beach of the Atlantic. 

But I must close the black lids of this fear- 
ful subject. It seems as if for the last hour I 
have been walking through a leprous lazaret- 
to. Groans on every side, and the air heavy 
with moral contagion. I am j)reaching this 
sermon, not because I expect to reclaim any 
one that has gone astray in this fearful path, 
but because I want to utter a warning for 
those who still maintain their integrity. The 
cases of reclamation are so few, probably you 
do not know one of them. I have seen a 



THE CHAINED CAPTIVE. 



2 39 



good many start out on that road. How 
many have I seen come back? Not one that 
I now think of. It seems as if the spell of 
death is on them, and no human voice nor the 
voice of God can break the spell. Their feet 
are hoppled. Their wrists are handcuffed. 
They have around them a girdle of reptiles, 
bunched at the waist, fastening them to an 
iron doom ; and every time they breathe, the 
forked tongues strike them, and they strain to 
break away, until the tendons snap and the 
blood exudes; and in the contortions of the 
eternally destroyed they cry out, "Take, me 
back to my father's house ! Where is moth- 
er ? Take me home ! Take me home !" 

But no, I do not believe there is one out of 
five thousand that ever comes back. It seems 
as if the infatuation is fatal. One went forth 
from a bright Christian home. There was no 
reason why she should forsake it ; but induced 
by unclean novelette literature and by thea- 
tre-going, she started off, and sat down at 
the banquet of devils. Every few weeks she 
would come back to her father's house, and 
hang up her hat and shawl in the old place, 



240 



THE SHEARS OF DELILAH 



as though she expected to stay ; but iu a few 
hours, as though hounded by an inexorable 
fate, she would take down again the hat and 
the shawl, and start out. When they called 
her back she slammed the door in their faces, 
and cried, " Oh, mother ! it's too late I" 

Do I stand before a man to-day, the locks 
of whose strength are being toyed with ? Let 
me tell you to escape, lest the shears of de- 
struction take your moral and your spiritual 
integrity. Do you not see your sandals be- 
ginning to curl on that red-hot path ? This 
clay, in the name of Almighty God, I tear off 
the beautifying veil and the embroidered man- 
tle of this old hag of iniquity, and I show you 
the ulcers, and the bloody ichor, and the can- 
celled lip, and the eaten-up nostril, and the part- 
ing joints, and the macerated limbs, and the 
wriggling putrefaction, and I cry out, "Oh, 
horror of horrors !" 

May the lightnings of an incensed Grod 
strike every house of shame, and consume all 
the tons of an impure literature, and write on 
the heavens, in capitals of fire a mile high, 
"All whoremongers and adulterers and sor- 



A CLOSING PRAYER. 



241 



cerers shall have their place in the lake that 
burnetii with fire and brimstone, which is the 
second death." 

May God forbid that any of you who have 
been invited into the ways of pleasantness and 
the paths of peace should turn your back on 
your safety and happiness, and go to sit down 
in a dungeon, where the eternally destroyed 
forever grind in the mills of despair, their 
locks shorn, and their eyes out. Samson un- 
gi anted. 



THE END. 



11 



TALMAGFS sermons. 

SERMONS BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE, DELIVERED IN THE 
BROOKLYN TABERNACLE. 



First Series. 

\21no, Cloth - $2 oo 

Second Series. 
i2vio, Cloth $2 oo 

Third Series. 
"Old Wells Dug Out?' i2mo, Cloth $2 oo 

Fourth Series. 
"Sports that Kill:' 120/0, Cloth, $1 25 ■ Paper, $1 00 



The Sermons of T. De Witt Talmage have received 
much attention from the press and the public. Be- 
low are given a few of the notices : 

A San Francisco (California) paper, speaking of Mr. Talmage's 
sermons in that city, says : " We believe that no such Christian preach- 
ing has been heard since the days when George Whitefield and the two 
Wesleys preached the Gospel on the shores of America. Sublime in 
his powers of pathetic and lucid description, terrible in the earnestness 
with which he pleads the cause of the undying soul, overwhelming 
with the tender overtures of redeeming mercy, and sparkling with 
graceful images and illustrative anecdote, the great multitude becomes 
as one man beneath his touch, and a silence broken only by an occa- 
sional gasping for breath from the whole assembly, attends his utter- 
ances from the first sentence to the last." 

They are the keenest, sharpest, and most vigorous specimens of pul- 
pit oratory we have yet read. — St. Johns (X. B.) Globe. 



Recommendations. 



We believe that for originality, power, and splendor, these sermons 
will bear comparison with the greatest pulpit productions of any age 
or country. But for the knowledge of human life, and the adapta- 
tion of divine truth to the whole being of man — intellectual, emotion- 
al, moral, practical — and for the power of applying that truth, we 
know not his equal. — Christian Age, London. 

These sermons I regard as among the best specimens of the simple, 
earnest, and pungent presentation of the solemn and precious truths of 
the Gospel that I have ever read, and having a fertility of illustration 
that is marvelous. I feel earnestly desirous that they should be in a 
form to preach to ministers of the Gospel, and so help them to preach 
to others. — Rev. E. D. G. Prime, D.D., New York Observer. 

Mr. Talmage is clear out of the old grooves and ruts of pulpit effort. 
You can not measure him by the books or criticise him by the schools. 
He is a law unto himself. In short, he is a mystery, a phenomenon, a 
contradiction of all the rules and books, and a most potent power for 
good. He speaks to more living people in this country than any oth- 
er man ; and his sermons being published both in this country and in 
England, his influence is wider felt than that of any other Protestant 
minister in the world. — Central Christian Advocate. 

The New York Independent says : " The new Tabernacle is mass- 
ive. It will hold nearly twice as many people as Plymouth Church. 
Mr. Talmage is a pulpit phenomenon. His conceptions of men and 
things are so vivid that he can not be said to possess them — they 
possess him. He is dramatic, and can not describe without acting. 
He has a clear, incisive mind, a broad and genial humor, a high and 
exacting conscientiousness, kindly sympathy, a vivid imagination, 
vehement passion, and every blow tells." 

We found ourselves in Dr. Talmage's immense audience-room con- 
taining seats for 5000 persons, with decorated ceiling, brilliant chan- 
deliers, and spacious galleries. When the exercises began, not a foot 
of sitting or standing room was anywhere visible. The whole scene 
of the evening proved that it does not require an intermingling of her- 
esy to fill churches. Here were crowds flocking to hear the most 
plain and pungent preaching on the old theme of Gospel salvation. — 
Advance, Chicago. 111. 



Recommendations. 



Mr. Spttkgeon, x)f London, says : "Mr. Talmage's discourses lay 
hold of my inmost soul. The Lord is with this mighty man of valor. 
So may he ever be till the campaign closes with victory ! I am in- 
deed glad of his voice. It cheers me intensely. He loves the Gos- 
pel, and believes in something, which some preachers hardly do. 
There are those about who use the old labels, but the articles are not 
the same. May the Lord win armies of souls to Jesus by this man ! 
I am astonished when God blesses me, but somehow I should not be 
so much surprised if he blessed this man." 

Mr. Talmage's sermons have ten readers in Great Britain where any 
other American sermons have one reader. — D. L. Moody. 

There is about Talmage a vehemence, an urgency, an earnestness, 
which sometimes carries him away as in a kind of wild whirlwind. 
He has immense command of words, and great fluency of speech. 
Bat he is not diffuse — any thing but that. His sentences, some of 
them especially, fall with a force and a strength which is sometimes 
almost painful. There is a reckless abandon about many of his ser- 
mons, a hearty outspokenness, which is as refreshing as a clip into a 
mountain stream on a hot summer's day. He has now the largest 
congregation and perhaps the most powerful church in America. — 
Northern Echo, Hartlepool, England. 

With an earnestness of appeal and a power of awakening that we 
have never heard surpassed, Dr. Talmage preaches the Old Gospel 
that kindled the enthusiasm of the rustic and unlettered apostles of 
Galilee, and at the same time elicited the zeal and influenced the heart 
of the cultured Pharisee of Tarsus. — London Christian World. 

Mr. Talmage's sermons are thoroughly evangelical, and are receiv- 
ing the widest attention. He is the most popular preacher of the day. 
— The Methodist. 

There is a tremendous nervous energy in Mr. Talmage's sentences. 
They startle by their very boldness. He does not k'now how to soften 
a denunciation, or kid-glove a lie, cheat, or sham. — Providence (R. I.) 
Press. 

Glowing with impassioned fervor, Mr. Talmnge wages a deadly war 
against the vices of the day in their most enticing forms. — New York 
Tribune. 



Recommendations. 



Dr. Talmage went to and fro with quiet step on that large platform, 
sinking his voice, now full of melody, almost to a whisper, yet ever au- 
dible, now rising up into an impassioned burst of unmistakable elo- 
quence, exceeding any thing we have ever heard since the early days 
of Father Gavazzi. When he had ended, it seemed like the ceasing 
of exquisite music. For two or three minutes there was a profound 
silence, until the congregation seemed to arouse themselves from the 
thrall. Then the vast multitude dispersed. — Liverpool (Eng.) Week- 
ly Mercury. 

In many respects Mr. Talmage stands at the head of American pul- 
pit orators, and none excel him in dramatic force. — St. Louis Times. 

We have known persons to drop the novel half finished, and take 
up Talmage's sermons, never to exchange truth for trash again. — 
Pittsburg Methodist Recorder. 

They are brimful of vitality, intense dramatic power of description, 
and an earnestness of conviction in what is said that impi-esses the. 
reader deeply. — New Orleans Picayune. 

A Baptist pastor in Michigan says: "Within a distance of ten 
miles there are five places (some of them school-houses) where every 
Sabbath people come together to hear Dr. Talmage's sermons read. 
They have been blessed-in many conversions." 

Talmage is in some respects superior to any living preacher. His 
book is as readable as a romance, and a world more profitable. — La- 
dies' Repository, Cincinnati. 

Do we consider the great influence of a popular preacher of the 
present day ? Neither Jeremy Taylor, Smith, or even Whitefield, had 
the opportunities given to Mr. Talmage through the press. — Union 
Advocate. 

That Mr. Talmage is a popular preacher Can not be denied, as he 
addresses the largest audience in Brooklyn, and perhaps the largest 
regular audience in America. He fulfills Garrick's idea of a preach- 
er, and talks of religion as if it were really a matter of supreme im- 
portance. His sermons read like plays, and must entertain, if they 
do not convert, his hearers ; but we have no reason to doubt the lat- 
ter, and commend them to such as enjoy this class of literature. — 
Commercial, Cincinnati. 



Recommendations. 5 



What building would be big enough to hold the congregation if 
such sermons were preached in London? — Congregationalist, London. 

The sermons by this celebrated divine are among the most admira- 
ble compositions in the language. — Springfield Advertiser. 

Mr. Talmage's descriptive powers are unique and of a high order ; 
in fact, we do not know of any preacher like him. — Pittsburg Times. 

In the author's happiest style, and outside of its religious merits, 
which are of a high order, it is more interesting than a romance. 
Nothing but the breaking down of the press can prevent this book 
having an immense sale. — Reading Times. 

Mr. Talmage is a finished speaker, with a terse and nervous style. 
— Irish Citizen. 

Dr. Talmage's sermons are more interesting, simply as literary 
works, than many novels. — Keystone, Philadelphia. 

Through this book Mr. Talmage will preach to nearly all the world. 
— Turf, Field, and Farm. 

Their power for good can scarcely be overestimated. "Whether 
heard or read, they produce a powerful impression, and are of the 
kind best adapted to reach the masses in these days of absorbing 
worldliness and eager pursuit of gain. — Christian Advocate. 

Mr. Talmage has proved that he can gather a regular Sabbath con- 
gregation of five thousand hearers, and that he can make himself ef- 
fectively heard by that number of people. He is one of those preach- 
ers who really belong to mankind at large. Most people who try to 
describe Dr. Talmage begin by saying that he is like somebody, or un- 
like somebody else. Now the fact is that he is not like any other per- 
son at all: he is just "Talmage" all over, with as much marked indi- 
viduality as ever was concentrated in any one man. — Union Era. 

Dr. Talmage is a star of commanding lustre in the pulpit of the 
North. His living thoughts and burning words, on the wings of the 
lightning and by the agency of the press, are borne to millions who 
have never heard his voice nor seen his face. — Daily Sun, Atlanta, Ga. 

Not a single page of his books can be designated as superfluous or 
tiresome. — St. Louis Republican. 

We doubt not that Dr. Talmage has gained greater celebrity than 
any man of his age. — Christian Advocate, Raleigh, N. C. 



Recommendations. 



Mr. Talmage preaches twice every Sunday to immense audiences. 
Every seat up to the rafters is filled. His manner is so impassioned, 
his style so original, and his figures so vivid and startling, that he 
holds his hearers spell-bound to the end, and he moves them to tears 
or smiles at will. — Charleston News and Courier. 

We thought last evening, as we looked over Mr. Talmage's audi- 
ence, now hushed so that we could hear the clock's solemn ticking 
keeping time to the speaker's utterances — people seemingly afraid to 
breathe, lest they might lose a word — we thought to ourselves, here is 
the perfection of oratory; here is dominion, absolute and undisputed. 
The attempt to do any thing but listen to those sentences — now short, 
sharp, and ringing, and now drawn out with a plaintiveness that will 
linger after his voice has died away — is so vain that it needs only to 
be mentioned and tried to show his power. — Free Press, Easton, Pa. 

Almost exactly such criticisms as are brought against him were 
brought against Luther, and against Whitefield and Wesley. But as 
in them all, so in Mr. Talmage, there are elements of power that the 
critics of words and phrases can not comprehend. Mr. Talmage is a 
genuine pulpit orator ; and his oratory is none the less effective be- 
cause it does not conform to pulpit canons. He wins his battles, as 
did Napoleon, by his violation of all rules. These sermons give a hint 
of the moral power that lies behind Mr. Talmage's burning eloquence 
and gives it force. — Christian Weekly. 

In Dr. Talmage's sermons there are portions of writing which, for 
thrilling interest, are not surpassed by the pages of fiction. — The Age, 
Philadelphia. 

There is apparently no hidden spring in the human heart that Dr. 
Talmage does not know how to reach. — Occident, San Francisco, Cal. 

Mr. Talmage has two continents for a congregation. In addition 
to the host that greet him every Sabbath, the Methodist prints one of 
his sermons every week; the Interior, of Chicago, gives his "Eriday 
Evening Addresses ;" the Christian Age, of London, gets the advanced 
sheets of his sermons (phonographically reported) for weekly publica- 
tion ; and other foreign papers are publishing his sermons and address- 
es. His discourses have appeared in book form in London, and are 
securing wide transatlantic attention. — Brooklyn Eagle. 



Recommendations. 



If ministers would more generally break away from the staid nice- 
ties and etiquetical mannerism of religious service, and cry aloud, 
using every opportunity and every available means to arrest the atten- 
tion of the people, all the while, like Talmage, preaching the primi- 
tive Gospel of Jesus — telling the "old, old story," it would be far bet- 
ter for the Church in all its branches. — Pittsburg Recorder. 

The sermons published in this series speak for themselves. They 
are printed exactly in the words delivered, and were all extempore. 
What precision, memory, directness, genius, and originality they re- 
veal need not be stated. They are more condensed than theorems, 
as rounded, pointed, and polished as essays, yet extemporaneous, and 
their preservation dependent upon reporters' pencils. Considering that 
Mr. Talmage is still a comparatively young man, he has won a celeb- 
rity as a preacher of which the church represented by him with such 
intense, earnest, and fervent eloquence ruay well be proud. — Chicago 
Inter- Ocean. 

Mr. Talmage is one of the most pathetic and eloquent men of the 
age. His published works are models of Anglo-Saxon style. — Meth- 
odist Recorder. 

He is a fearless antagonist to all forms of sin — a writer who cares 
more for cleaving a helmet than for showing the jewels on the handle 
of his weapon. Blows are what he gives ; and yet, as the blade goes 
swiftly down, the jewels frequently flash on the eye. The raciness and 
abandonment to his work, conspicuous in all the writer says, will find 
eager readers everywhere. — Interior. 

These sermons certainly unveil to us the secret of Mr. Talmage's 
extraordinary power as a preacher. * * * The great themes of ex- 
perimental piety and holy living are sent home upon the hearts of 
men with remarkable directness, force, and fervor. Mr. Talmage has 
a strong imagination, which seldom flags in word-painting, and usual- 
ly arrays the most common truths in all the freshness of new discov- 
eries, and all the glow of living reality. To this he adds a quick in- 
sight into human nature, the foibles, vices, and iniquities of the day, 
and the Gospel as the only remedy for human corruption. All is 
swayed by an overmastering Christian earnestness. — Presbyterian 
Quarterly. 



/ / ' 






Recommendations. 



Mr. Talmage's knowledge of human nature, his sparkling humor, 
his pruning-hook as well as his scalping-knife, his deep and clear com- 
prehension of what is spiritually beautiful, as well as his hatred of all 
that is radically wrong, together with his own pure Christian life and 
experience — all conspire to -make his utterances and practical work a 
blessing to those who hear or read his discourses. — Industrial Monthly. 

A writer from South Australia says: "I read every Sabbath the 
choice and sonl-stirring sermons of Dr. Talmage to the people. Ev- 
ery one is delighted to hear them." 

They are the product of strong thought, a red-hot heart, a tremen- 
dous earnestness, and a determined purpose to do something for Jesus 
Christ. So he says many thiugs that other men omit to say, and 
passes by many things that they do say. The book is a live one, and 
we welcome it. — Northern Christian Advocate. 

Besides performing all the functions of a minister and pastor, Mr. 
Talmage conducts his "Lay College," and writes from four to five 
columns a week for his Christian at Work. Within five years he has 
built two immense and costly churches — the second replacing the first, 
which was destroyed by fire. Mr. Talmage works steadily on at the 
same high pressure, without giving the slightest evidence of fatigue. — 
Zioris Herald, Boston. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

Harper & Brothers ivill send the above works by mail, postage pre-paid, 
to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price. 



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